


Entanglements

by Folodu



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Genre: Angst and Romance, Creampie, Cunnilingus, F/M, Female Ejaculation, Kink Exploration, Light Bondage, Love Confessions, Porn with Feelings, Reincarnation, SMUT FOR THE SMUT GODS, Sex Toys, Sexual Fantasy, Shenanigans, Size Difference, Size Kink, Slow Build, Some Intrigue, Some Plot, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, clothing gets destroyed ok, kinky history nerds in desperate need of a good lay, mild peril play, mostly sex though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:07:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 47,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26361652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Folodu/pseuds/Folodu
Summary: It's a good thing a country of spirits needs precious little governing.It would never have begun if she hadn't approached him when he fell asleep in the castle library months ago. If she hadn't touched him tenderly and tried to coax him to a proper bed. If he hadn't resisted her efforts to awaken him and clung to the dream.If she hadn't stayed.Zelda's PoV, a sort-of canon-adjacent romp set after Volume II ofShade of My Enemyand beta'd by its author.
Relationships: Ganondorf/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 25
Kudos: 48





	1. Opening Gambit

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Shade of My Enemy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21312370) by [StudioRat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StudioRat/pseuds/StudioRat). 



> The King and the Princess have begun at last to have open conversations _beyond_ the secret war to weaken Zant's hold on Hyrule and curb his power in the Twilight. The campaign for Eldin is going about as well as anyone could expect, and keeping the wolfboy focused on infiltrating the fallen shrines - and _only_ the fallen shrines - without losing more of the blin warriors to Zant's control is proving more challenging with every passing week.
> 
> One conversation went sideways near the beginning of that campaign.  
> Then another.  
> And another after that.
> 
> Ganondorf is _trying_ to resist the distraction.  
> They are too different. His memories of Windblade - their fragile friendship, their troubled alliance, their hesitance in bed, their political and cultural divide - are too strong. She is not the same Zelda at all, though a shard of them persists in her spirit. Without the regalia, the physical resemblance is not even terribly strong. But sometimes - she will snap at him in a certain way, or her gray eyes will shift towards a cold blue, or she will throw his own words in his face, twisting them far from his intent - and it's _them_ , and he cannot endure it. He cannot trust his twilight Zelda not to betray him as her ancestor did.  
> But - there is no one in this life who can spy on his heart. Attachment is no longer the deadly poison it was in his youth. She seeks his company and conversation in a way few people ever did, and if he gives her any opening she will seek his embrace, and touch his scarred body without fear.  
> She is clever, she is well-read, she is tactically intelligent if rather over-cautious. She is not without prejudice - but she is not only willing to revise it, but actively works to _understand_ and bridge differences. She has even made friends - or perhaps more appropriately, devotees - of her blin guards, people who Hyrule has long considered monsters. She is good and kind - though perhaps not _nice._ She understood her army was outmatched, that Zant leveraged weapons her age no longer understood and had no hope of defeating. She sacrificed her own position and comfort to protect her people without a second thought.  
> She would make a glorious Queen.  
> The only way to be certain of mastering temptation is to stay away entirely - but he craves her clever conversation as much as he longs for her gentle hands. And there _is_ the small but nagging concern of the Twilight fever, which resists every spell and potion leveraged to soothe or cure it...
> 
> Zelda has neither court politics nor manners to coddle. She doesn't need to remain aloof to preserve Hyrule from aggressive foreign suitors, and even if she could leave the Castle for a masked dalliance, there is no one to see her do it, no one to pressure her into choosing a proper consort or gossip about the Crown Princess taking _or_ discarding lovers of indifferent rank. There is no one to make political trouble over whether or not her conduct cleaves to any religious code or none.  
> The blins _do_ gossip amongst themselves - in fact, the whole army probably knows by now that their King has lain down with her. Some of them seem to regard it as a natural and inevitable result of his military conquest, where her personal guard seems to congratulate her on an advantageous match. None of them seem to _care_ except as a little whistling and cheering and pointed closing of doors is something to lighten the boring and dangerous duty of guarding the walls against the Changed, Twilight-maddened monsters.  
> And... he is the living manifestation of her girlhood book-crush. He _is_ the fierce and well-educated Prince of the Discourses, he _is_ the hand behind a mountain of clever and sardonic marginalia salting half the books in the library predating the Pax Hylia. So much of what she hopelessly longed for in a true consort, a match of equals, seemed an unattainable fiction - but he is real. Complicated and bitter and cagy, but _real_.  
> And he _is_ working to free Hyrule... for himself.  
> If she can outlive the Twilight consuming the land and its blood-bound guardian... and keep him from guessing her weakness, there is still hope.  
> But... he has invited her counsel from time to time, and he seems to respect her right to hold a different opinion even if he doesn't agree with or follow it. He is a skilled and sensitive lover, endowed with virtues she never considered possible but now cannot help but crave more of.  
> If he would only accept her at his side, if they could rule together, if they could forge an alliance of strength _and_ of affection...  
> 

Gentle rain misted against the leaded window as Zelda counted down from two hundred, and still the only sound from _within_ her tower suite remained the soft chatter of the fire. The click of his boots paused some time ago. She began to count when the muffled bumps and slides and general rummage of his search ceased entirely. She had rather expected to hear a swear from his soft lips, or at least a sardonic grunt. She had toyed all morning with the speculation of whether he would confront her with something in hand, or issue some sarcastic taunt from the door of her dressing room.

With every passing moment it seemed more likely he would instead pretend to have discovered nothing at all, and curtail yet another afternoon tea for his unfathomable, antique ideas of proper conduct between King and - whatever he regarded her as.

He called her _Princess_ more often than anything else - _Highness_ and _Majesty_ never left his tongue for anything but anger or contempt, and more usually _both_ . He did not defer to her in _anything_ , and reminded her all too often that she surrendered her power in a desperate bid to mitigate the suffering of her people under Zant’s merciless advance. 

And yet - he let her keep her circlet, and he let her cling to the crumbs of her rank as Crown Princess, and never actually demanded she hail him properly as Majesty or anything else. _She_ understood his intent to claim the throne, and _she_ named him king first. He never corrected her, nor made any comment on her frequently sarcastic and insubordinate use of the title.

Ganondorf let her remain in her castle under _his_ reign. Where Zant ensured with his twilight she could not even step _outside_ in human form, the Gerudo warlord wrapped her castle in layer after layer of magic shields with every week he held her throne. He neither demanded she leave, nor asked why she had not escaped the place before or after his army came from the wastelands, but he _had_ smiled a little when he found her walking in the garden a fortnight ago.

She wondered if he understood that guarding his blin warriors from Zant’s influence and the cursed changes wrought by the Twilight itself also gave her ever more freedom of her own home. She hesitated to ask, and give him more power than he already had if he _didn’t_ know. His little hints and queries suggested he might attribute her wider ranging as evidence of the “Twilight Fever” diminishing, even though the webs of curse naevi continued to spread and thicken. 

He seemed pleased to believe reclaiming land from Zant returned her strength to her.

Zelda hesitated to give him any further knowledge of the land spirits. He knew they existed, that their shrines were important above and beyond the recovery of the Fused Shadows, but he didn’t seem aware she needed to _reach_ their sacred waters to purify her own corrupted flesh and repair the connections that would allow her to draw strength from what little of Hyrule the wolfboy had been able to cleanse so far.

She was afraid he would bar her from pilgrimage.

She was afraid he would drag her to a holy spring at once.

She was afraid what he would do when Midna’s magical gifts were no longer enough to suppress the Change.

She was afraid what would happen to the guardian spirits if the once-dead king walked on sacred ground, if his blood and spirit mingled with the holy waters.

Their alliance remained tenuous - and tempestuous. She understood the epithets of storm and thunder salting the letters addressed to the Prince in the _Discourses_ now. She feared to give him more leverage against her, against Hyrule, even as she wished fervently that she _could_ trust him. In his own time, he had many righteous grievances against her country - and her ancestors - but generations had passed since his execution. The world changed. _People_ changed.

Ganondorf returned to the mortal world bearing the mark of the Gods’ Chosen - but he also bore a strange and grievous wound that remained raw in flesh and spirit. He tried to keep it hidden from her - even when he surrendered to the tides of desire, he kept at least one layer of linen veiling the light bleeding from his chest, as if that would make any difference to her Heartsight. She let him have that fragile lie of plausible deniability - for now. 

He carried into her castle every old resentment as fresh as the day he was slain on the stone of judgment and cast into a prison of stone and magic that was _supposed_ to hold his rage for all time. 

And yet.

For all his growling and profanity - he laid hands on her in anger only _once_ , the day they met. Even then - he ignored dozens of opportunities to cement his victory, embracing violence only when he saw religious artifacts of his people used for the mundane purpose of bringing light into the library tower. She had no doubt he’d come within inches of cutting her down in that moment - but he stopped. Through the incandescent rage that lit his golden eyes with eldritch fire, he heard her words, and accepted them.

He let her go. His sword remained in its sheath. He walked away.

And half an hour later, allowed her to aid his search in the archives, tracing backwards through Zant’s invasion and the drought which preceded it.

He carefully avoided touch from that moment, slipping only in distress or exhaustion - or when her own strength failed. _Months_ after his half-unconscious desire ruined her wave dress in the library, he’d touched her only four more times in passion, only with much persuasion and assurance that she took pleasure in his embrace, and only twice allowed her to _taste_ his regal girth. Although - the second time perhaps ought to weigh heavier, for it stretched into hours and _hours_ of hedonistic release. She counted it as only one, however, for he resisted her invitations so fiercely - and when at last her need was sated and she slipped into exhausted unconsciousness, he left her side while she slept, and withdrew his touch once more. 

He treated her privacy as sacrosanct. He assigned her a guard, but made no real effort to ensure their loyalties remained solely his. He secured small luxuries for her, and sent an entire unit of cavalry to Eldin for spring water for her use alone. He was solicitous of her health - even if that concern manifested as peevish growling and snappish orders rather than tenderness. He served her tea with his own hands, for love of Light.

And now he stood - or perhaps sat - in silence in her dressing room.

If he hadn’t vanished by magic several minutes ago.

Zelda sighed at the window and tried to resign herself to another disappointment. He could not accuse her of any lie - her hair _did_ annoy her, and it would be an unbelievably welcome luxury to surrender to someone else tending it for her for the first time in nearly a year. She shivered to think of how he’d moved so quickly to untangle her earring though, his fingers deft and gentle - artless and unconscious. She hoped he didn’t know how her stomach knotted when he murmured soft and soothing nonsense as he worked to smooth stray locks back into place after, fussing over twists in the ribbons - their discussion of the campaign for the mountains forgotten. 

She hadn’t expected that. She thought she would have been persuading him to fetch a comb or fresh ribbon, not stumbling after her words when he stroked her hair and teased her with a threat of fixing her ragged braids. Zelda was a little surprised he smiled at her hurried taunt about elaborate coiffures. His golden eyes had creased so charmingly as he caressed the top of her head and bent to tell her he knew elegant patterns far more suited to her silk than his own usual segmented twists. He seemed on the edge of kissing her for a moment - but instead he only asked if she would like to see what his fingers remembered.

Zelda shook her head at the vaporous romantic folly as she reached the dressing room door. It was silly to have struggled to answer him, and sillier still that she had blushed and stammered to direct him to find the tools in the dressing room.

Where he did, in fact, still stand beside the vanity. Two of the drawers hung open - the smaller was full of fat ribbons and silk sashes, where the larger held amusements of rather less ambiguous design. He cradled the middling-thick purple amethyst plug in his broad palm, and he stared at it as if he could not understand the evidence of his own eyes. She could easily believe he hadn’t moved in two minutes _at least,_ given his utter lack of reaction to her approaching footsteps.

Zelda leaned against the doorframe, mirroring the same languid arrogance _he_ so often indulged. “If you’re curious I can find some gentle lubricant for you.”

Gan raised his golden eyes to meet her gaze, his expression completely opaque.

Zelda smiled indulgently. “No need to be worried, it warms up very quickly. But if you’d feel more comfortable with a _modest_ beginning, there is a rose quartz variant in the other drawer.”

Gan said nothing, his hand closing around the curvaceous sculpture.

“Personally, I prefer the slightly larger gold one tucked under the paddle.”

Ten beats slid past them in silence.

A single word, barely voiced, snuck past his wide lips. “Larger…”


	2. Fifth Time is a Charm

Despite the ashen cast to his features, Ganondorf did  _ not _ faint at the thought of a pleasure tool sculpted broader than the breadth of two fingers and longer than the length of a palm, by Hylian standards, which were until recently the only standard she’d considered. He blinked fast, but otherwise remained blank and rigid, as if the entire furious brilliance of his mind was frozen by his one little discovery.

“Well,  _ yes _ ,” she returned, arch and amused. “Of  _ course _ I collect a variety of tools. One cannot indulge in the full diversity of... athletic amusements one enjoys if one does not keep oneself ready. Besides, you never know if you might have an... enthusiastic kni-er. Lover.”

Gan licked his lips, golden eyes searching her face for something. Five entire beats slid past before he attempted further speech. “But... sacred maiden…”

“A girl gets cold and lonely, desert king. And there is no amount of enjoying oneself that changes the sacred part.”

Gan shook his head, voice rasping. “Please tell me you keep  _ something _ harder than wine in some part of this godsforsaken castle.”

“I assume you mean besides the thing in your hand - which, if it makes you uncomfortable,  _ has _ seen it’s fair share of use. You may want to put it down and... I don’t know. Wash your hands or something, if its purpose disturbs your equanimity so.”

Gan slowly looked down at the elegant amethyst plug, blinking a couple times. “Gold you said. Under the - that leather strap is called a  _ paddle _ now-?”

“Yes? A strap is slightly different,” she said, unfolding her arms and moving away from the door. “I can show you if you like. That’s kept with soft goods.”

Gan carefully returned the plug to its spot, the precise and rigid movement and stumbling in his voice revealing his flustered state. “Ah, no need, simply a curious... shift of language. Paddle once referred to a...  _ tool... _ fashioned from a rather  _ specific _ dimension of sanded and oiled hardwood plank.”

Zelda grinned mischievously at his discomfort. “I may have one of those, as well. Shall we go digging? Or have you seen all you needed to see?”

“If the Princess in her grace will allow but one more moment of... scholarly curiosity? It is not an order - I do not  _ require _ the knowledge, I am merely... once the first measure is heard one becomes interested to hear the shape of the melody,” he said in an unusually hurried rumble, struggling to arrange the words on his tongue as he spoke them. In most conversations, he used moments of silence or ambiguous wordless hums and grunts to create spaces in their dialogues. He was always precise, often eloquent, and when he was  _ not _ fielding sharp rebukes, or cutting the fragile threads of their connection with frigid manners, he frequently adopted the tone of a sardonic and critical - but nonetheless objective - scholar. 

“I did not - intend to disturb your possessions,” he added. He flexed his hand, clearly contemplating the black leather tool and the promised treasure hiding beneath it. “I rather had expected to find the ribbons and brushes and combs I was looking for in the vanity drawers, you understand.”

Zelda crossed the little room, moving perilously close to him, her full skirts swaying softly, the muslin ruffles of her petticoats teasing the polished leather of his riding boots. She bent over the drawer in a way calculated to cause some bit of trouble and picked up the device. “I can hardly call them  _ mine _ when my lands have been so thoroughly claimed, oh my king. In what  _ way _ would you like to study this?”

Gan, swallowed hard, barely glancing at her, clearly distracted by the revelation of the golden plug, which was a more voluptuous rendition of the amethyst curves. At the widest, it was slightly more than three fingers’ breadth across by Hylian standards. 

Zelda offered the leather paddle to him.

Gan drew a measured breath and tore his gaze away from the jeweled sculpture in the drawer, muttering something suspiciously like a prayer of relieved thanks under his breath, and something about  _ still modest _ .

Zelda grinned wide. “Ah - I see. So you were interested in the  _ other _ item. Do... you want a demonstration?”

Gan’s eyes flared wide - only for a moment, but his breath caught also, betraying the visceral intensity of his private thoughts, if not their nature. His sharp, scarred cheeks darkened. “Unnecessary. The education of a king among my people was... comprehensive. Merely curiosity with respect to ... certain shifts in modern Hylian ... customs.”

“So it  _ wouldn’t _ interest my king to see how well this fits in me,” Zelda taunted, gesturing toward the jewel with the light leather paddle. “ _ Interesting, _ considering how you taunted all week about how it was impossible to fit within a “sacred maiden”. Pity. I was looking forward to it. Shall we have tea?”

“Oh,” breathed Gan. His face seemed to darken further.

Zelda grinned, putting the paddle back “I  _ do _ believe a good ginsing may be in order.”

“Sa’deasa ikhusa,” he said softly. A telltale bead of sweat emerged at his temple, and his casual shift of weight was entirely suspect.

Zelda took a moment “arranging” the drawer to allow  _ him _ a moment of staring at her ass, if he was bold enough.

Which - he certainly  _ did _ , worrying his lip between his teeth in silence, apparently ignorant that  _ her _ angle with respect to the mirror put his unguarded expression within full view.

She watched him look at her with evident desire - his sardonic indifference softening into longing only when he thought his true self hidden, his royal dignity secure. She kept her hands moving, to keep him from guessing her regard. She made certain to wrap her hand around the plug for him to see as she tucked it more securely on top of the other small and common things in the shallow drawer. “There. That should work better.”

“ I... intend no insult to your strength, Princess, nor a coy taunt. I am - not a small man. That little lotus bulb is - still modest. But,” He paused, drawing another measured breath, and his knuckles cracked as he flexed his hands at his sides. “But. If you are missing the luxury of - being attended by a companion fallen to twilight ... I could ... with these curious jewels I ... that is…”

“I was not expecting to steal your breath away with but a sly thought of fitting your  _ -unf- _ staff within a royal rose garden.” Zelda stood, holding the toy like a scepter, displaying the bright blue jewel in the flared base which matched the sapphire of her circlet. “Perhaps I can help you say it better. Would you like me to try for you?”

Gan fidgeted again. “You understand this is... an unexpected turn from you, Princess.”

“Is it now,” countered Zelda with a saucy grin. “You’ve spent half the week buried in me and now seen my -  _ ahem _ \- collection, and you sit on my throne. What effect should a little shyness have on me now, oh my king? Why should I keep any part of myself hidden away when you have so thoroughly exercised yourself upon and within me? A body has desires. And being that I am permitted so few ways to assist in  _ your _ work, I may as well enjoy the luxuries I have not had access to. So here you are, intelligent and well spoken and handsome - and an excellent bed partner. Are you not tempted to know? Do you  _ really _ desire to only be only a set of hands for me?”

Gan coughed, the sound suspiciously thin. “ _ Thoroughly _ is not the word I would have chosen for the beginnings of a... dalliance of... convenient neighbors.”

Zelda sighed.

“You are clever to be sure,” he added in a hurried tone. “Fielding both righteous purpose and intelligent strategies  _ may _ turn the tide of  _ a _ battle, but they are not enough to win a war. To all you have, I add knowledge of the enemy and a great deal of practical experience in war - and I can speak with my warriors directly, without those necessary hazards of translation.”

“ _ Clever and intelligent _ you say, even as you banish me from your stratagems,” she countered with a scowl. “I may not have the experience of leading a war as you may, but I have studied the histories and theories thereof. Further, I know my library - and contemporary history! - a good deal better than you, to cover the gaps in what you know.”

He rolled his eyes and ignored her counterpoint. “As to my  _ desires _ ... the less said, the better, I should think.”

“As I see it, oh my king, you are  _ frightened _ . Maybe not of the war, but certainly of  _ me _ . You can’t even bear to tell me you want to fit your crown in a place that aches to know its presence. You cannot bear the shame that I know what you want of me - or at least of women in general.” Zelda studied him a long moment, and shook her head. “ _ I am not Windblade _ . And yet you still cannot separate me from her. And that scares you.”

“Not the words I would have chosen,” he rumbled carefully. “The history of my... campaigns for Windblade are complicated. You carry her spirit within you, whether you wish to admit this truth or not. I am not  _ afraid _ you will repeat her treachery. It is a certainty. Only the date, the time, the  _ exact _ catalyst remains in question.”

Zelda groaned in frustration, rolling her eyes.

“Nor am I  _ ashamed _ of the physical desire I... cannot help but harbor for you. I am...  _ frustrated _ that I have yet to conquer it. And you - lay such temptations - and then to find you are capable of enduring the Sun’s Thorn because you have for some inexplicable reason collected training lotus-? And - these other jewels and... pleasure tools?”

Zelda raised a brow, toying with the flared and tapered little instrument.

“The true agony rises from a... related but... even more unattainable desire, Princess.” 

Zelda tipped her chin with an air of expectant curiosity.

Gan worked his jaw, his eyes fixed on hers. “I am  _ not _ frightened. I am revising my assessment of the field, that is all. I am yet a mortal king, and still subject to weariness of mind and flesh from time to time. If you mean to again offer the embrace of your oasis as tribute in petition for an afternoon of fleshly pleasures... we will consider it.“

Zelda huffed in annoyance and poked his hip with the golden plug - reaching any higher would be undignified. “If I am destined to repeat another Zelda’s mistakes by the accident of birth, then what can be said of  _ you _ , who has no such excuse between the time of her and me? I do not wish to speak ill of the dead, but I am left with no choice. Windblade was a powerful queen, and aimed at even more than that. I have not made any habit of increasing the breadth of  _ my _ land, only the depth of the people’s roots and happiness in what is already ours.” 

He snorted in contempt.

She huffed. “You may sit on the throne, and yet I am still bound to this land in the ways that matter. I offer no tit for tat petition, oh my king. I state this - my ‘oasis’ will not accept you until you make the attempt to please me in the very way  _ this _ was designed to be used.”

“ _ Attempt _ is the most accurate word you’ve employed yet, Princess. As I said, that little lotus bulb is still blessedly modest. You have persuaded yourself that your - other experiences are sufficient introduction to the Sun’s Thorn, but I assure you, the dark rose is less forgiving of the excess of ambition you cultivate now,” he countered, folding his arms and retreating into a sardonic tone once more.

“You think me a fool since I don’t have the number of years behind me that you do?” Zelda laughed with an edge of real mirth. “Goddesses, but you worry so. Why do you think you found the smaller amethyst bulb? Do you think I wouldn’t know how to properly ready myself? Do you think I don’t know how large your thorn is, oh my king? That I have held in my own hands?”

Gan sighed. He worked his jaw and transparently struggled to assemble words.

Zelda watched him, demonstrating upon the gold plug in her hands the how her fingers worked upon his flesh last time he admitted her touch. “You make it so damned hard to sort out your meaning, and yet it seems like the answer is just beyond my fingertips. But - maybe.  _ Maybe _ I can yet suss it out.”

“Meanwhile, you do everything in your power to assure the difficulty of reasonable conversation,” he grumbled. “I have survived without your waters a long time - perhaps the little  _ hardship _ you threaten is exactly what discipline wants to restore its suppleness.”

Zelda turned, perching on the edge of the vanity. She set the lotus down among a few loose ribbons and laces. She began gathering her skirts up, revealing her ankle, and ever so slowly…  _ more _ . “Oh my king, can you still say you can survive without my well when it opens before you?”

He groaned, and pulled his gaze away from the curve of silk-sheathed legs. “Temptress-! A clever and wicked fool to be sure, overconfident that the knowledge of your hands is equal to the strain you have already risked within your tender oasis, and furthermore ridiculous to expect that even the smoothest of oils and most elegant sequence of training bulbs is sufficient to prepare your rose for me! Those few I indulged in their folly long ago? They trained for  _ weeks _ , with  _ eight _ varied steps in the bulb, the last of which must have a stem at least half of my own unaided girth, and the bulb of which must exceed my greatest  _ bound _ dimensions by at  _ least _ a quarter.”

Zelda stopped raising her full skirts at mid-thigh as he described the tools necessary. She chewed her lip in thought. “That’s…”

He grunted assent. “Only then would I admit them to the embrace they  _ thought _ they wanted.”

She rolled her eyes slowly as she calculated. “As I was saying, that is  _ quite _ technical. I accept your offer. When you present the tools, it would please me to have your assistance in applying them.  _ What use knowledge without action _ , after all. I shall reward you with a kiss wherever you would like.”

Gan swore.

Zelda preened openly as she finally got to turn these particular words back on him. 

“I do not have the purified materials at present but - if the Princess is  _ certain _ she desires such training I… shall see to the acquisition of a proper glass forge and the like,” he grumbled. “Further tribute is unnecessary for such little commonplace -  _ anyway _ . I prefer to reserve exchanging the mysteries of the kiss for answering need from truly inexperienced initiates and questioning souls… and the blessedly rare cry of devoted passion.”

“Ah, yes,” Zelda grinned fondly. “That  _ would _ explain the bit of an aching lip after our last encounter. I do recall you were completely enveloped and enraptured with my ‘tender’ oasis at the time of that  _ particular _ incident. And that throbbing - quite divine. Tell me, oh my king, do you master your flesh so well that you no longer throb at such memories? I haven’t quite learned the trick yet.”

“Oh,” said Gan softly, his golden eyes drifting back to her.

Zelda’s thighs flexed as her hand wandered along the edge of her skirt, her nail drawing a line over the white silk stocking towards her core.

His gaze followed her fingertips, and even his high-collared arming coat and his neatly trimmed beard could not hide the sharp little swallow. His deep rumble gained a subtle rasping edge. “Oh no, the memories remain a torment. My flesh continues to attempt to undermine my discipline. I cannot rest without feeling the phantom of your honeyed waters troubling me. There is no trick, no technique which will completely conquer the cry of the flesh, only temper the Will to maintain sovereignty over the consequence of the cry.”

“Forgive my ignorance in this, oh my king,” Zelda inhaled as her fingers vanished under the folds of the skirt. She rocked her hand back, catching the voluminous cloth under her wrist, drawing it back to let him see, if he chose, that her fingers teased at the dark honey-gold curls which were the only veil remaining over her desire. “I cannot fathom why we should  _ bother _ to pretend to not want that which is before us. The blins you have watching me only care as much as they can cheer, and there is no one else who can see beyond the veil. You speak of being the master of your flesh. But we really aren’t, are we? We are the master of what we think we should do. But the flesh wants - yes, even for that which you caution so heavily against. And I see so little reason to deny it.”


	3. Raised Shields

Gan drew a tight, measured breath, his eyes still riveted to the journey of her fingers. When he portioned his wind slowly out, he dragged his golden eyes up from her temptations to meet her stare instead. “Because I am a  _ selfish _ man, Zelda. The electric pleasure of the ephemeral physical embrace is - fragile and fleeting. Only a fool roots their faith in sand and expects the fickle rain to nourish it. Howsoever much delight you find in multiplying my punishment for  _ ever _ permitting myself to act on the desire, you cannot persuade me to forget this truth which I have learned already a hundred thousand times - and  _ no _ , not just from Windblade, nor were they the first to teach it.”

Zelda’s hand curled against her flesh as she sucked in a breath. 

“Oh - you loved her.” 

He closed his eyes.

Zelda felt the story sink into place. Could swear she almost heard the music - horridly unfashionable now, but - there was something in that knowledge that felt  _ right _ to know. That suggested the history never stated in books. “You didn’t  _ just _ court her for advantage.”

He winced.

She reached out towards him with one hand, her other tracing idle whorls further and further down her body as she teased her thighs apart. “I - I’m not her. I cannot give you the feelings she had. Only my own.”

He sighed, working his jaw. “There  _ are _ advantages to plain,  _ physical _ arrangements. I have - I once found pleasure and comfort in these also and - I  _ have _ tried to reshape my intention to maintain that manner of boundary in these… four little… entanglements. Perhaps  _ both _ distance and repetition may together be used as temper and hammer to reforge this into - a pragmatic treaty.”

“Five, counting today  _ and _ the library. I will not be persuaded to forget it,” Zelda grinned as she grabbed the cuff of his arming coat to tease him closer and her other hand parting her gates for him to see. “My feelings towards you are complicated. You say you’re selfish? I cannot help but agree. Hiding away behind all those layers. Show me, oh my king. Let me feel how you care about me again. Let me hold you as you cry into my hair once more.”

Gan seemed to startle at that, even as he let her draw him closer. He began to shape a word, then shook his head, as if to banish the smallest shadow of it. Whatever thought rose in his mind, he was determined to hide it. He drew a deep breath, and rolled his shoulders back. 

With deliberate grace, he tugged loose one upper tie of the forward panel of the coat, letting the quilted cloth fall slowly at a fetching angle, revealing subtle embroidered runes in every possible color hidden under the sober black wool. “Would the Princess prefer a sheath or - a deep ward? I am somewhat more rested this afternoon. I can weave a persistent guard against conception this time which will be… broadly effective, if you wish.”

“ _ Pragmatic treaty _ , you said. Even as you offer to let me feel your heat most directly.” Zelda guided his wrist lower as he neared, spreading her knees to accommodate his thighs. Her other hand she rested on the rise of his hip, ready to keep pulling him closer. “Tell me, oh my king, which you prefer. You’ve shown such attention to my wants. Today I desire to attend yours, though I’m sure you can guess what I hope you choose.”

“Oh? You have... acquired a taste for the King’s Milk have you-?” He rumbled low for her, letting her pull him between her stockinged thighs. Heat radiated from his body despite the quilted arming coat, and the protective layers under his black silk sirwal. He stretched his broad fingers to brush over the bunched folds of her fine muslin skirts and petticoats, and down to the top edge of her white silk stockings. With his other hand, he pulled loose the second tie on that side, letting the heavy quilted panel drift askew. “The question is partly whether  _ you _ prefer  _ constancy _ in the silken thrust, the slick tension persistent whatever the rhythm or… length of the dance. Abundance of milk and honey commingled… changes the nature of paradise. Clings to the secret subtle nuances of the land - and to the traveler. Some women enjoy meditation on the stations of the day, others prefer meditations in the timeless mist - I did not have… I summoned a sheath for the first and second dance without… asking your taste, partly in answer to the urgency of your petition. The third -  _ gods _ how you amplified your torments.”

“You mean to turn this back on me, oh my king. I am wise to some of your ways by now, and will not be distracted from offering that which you desire.” Her fingers gripped the sleeve of his arming coat tightly in the same manner as her thighs tightened against his hips. She let her eyes wander over his body. She trailed her nails across the thick cloth to just teasing under the edge of the loosened coat panel to trace the waistband of the sirwal keeping him still hidden away.

Gan licked his lips, his golden eyes roving over her. He kept his counsel. He let her toy with his clothing. His thumb traced the golden embroidery at the top of her stocking.

“Perhaps,” she began, “it may be instructive for you to hear of my favorite dalliances, so that you may form a more complete understanding. And maybe you will form an opinion on what it is  _ you _ crave. Though I must warn you. If you put too much weight on my being a ‘sacred maiden’, then you may find the tales a bit profane.”

“I do not need you to unveil  _ your _ private mysteries to instruct me in my own opinions,” he huffed, eyes narrowed in irritation. “Do you not  _ listen _ with those long white ears? Can you not, for some  _ unfathomable _ reason, perceive my pattern? Have you  _ somehow _ failed to mark my appetite for your song-?”

Zelda pinched at his flesh through the thick quilting playfully.

He pulled a hissing breath through his teeth.

“I would be a fool to not have noticed, oh my king,” Zelda’s voice lilted through her new favorite endearment. With each point she made, Zelda’s hips rocked in mimicry of those very thrusts. She felt overwarm indulging the memory - and the promise that she would soon have him again. “I distinctly recall your  _ delicious _ remarks about your seed dripping from my ripe fields - and how you became rather  _ grander _ as you tried to, how did you put it, ‘despoil my oasis with your rain of victory’. How your breath caught when you could no longer bear to withhold your heat, and your hips made such small little motions as you lost yourself in me. Tell me, oh my king, that you want to use a sheath rather than lose yourself to the thought of filling me with the King’s Milk again.”

“You court  _ such _ peril with your taunts,” he growled, sliding his hand up her thigh, over bare skin and the silk ribbons tethering her stockings to her soft white stays. His thumb drifted towards the crease of her thigh, teasing the very edge of her curls as he bowed lower, bringing his dark rumble closer to her ear. “You seem to be missing some of your  _ fine _ regalia Princess - or do you  _ often _ risk wounded dignity to savor the tease of wind in your petticoats?”

He raised his other hand to brush a fingertip down the side of her neck. Gentle and teasing this time, where in their last tryst he enveloped her in warmth and strength from the first. Yet he  _ also _ shifted his stance, bringing his hips close enough to hers that silk and wool pressed against her inner thigh, nudging her still wider. “Tell me Princess - will you sing louder for having your fields  _ thoroughly plowed _ or  _ deeply flooded-? _ Choose carefully, for your perfume spices the air already, and the sword hungers for a pretty Hylian sheath, delicately  _ lined _ and  _ oiled _ or no.” 

Zelda’s hips rocked towards the light tease of his fingertip, her flesh seeking his touch without consulting the rest of her first. “It pleases me to quicken your pulse, oh my king. To give no answer so final that every time you see me you do not still  _ wonder. _ If you were to set me over a table as if I’m some exotic drink to savor, would  _ you _ wish to encounter a barrier? It would please me, oh my king, to feel you flood me again. To watch your face again as you taunt me.”

Her hand dipped under the loose quilted panel of his arming coat to gently press her hand against the silk and wool guarding his warm shaft. Impossible to know for certain if his interest stirred, for he wore his old-fashioned loincloth wound tight, and layered over it linen breeks, arming suit, and sirwal. Modest as a maiden aunt.

He drew a hissing breath and growled a wordless rebuke over her ear. He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck, warm and strong like his dark voice. His thumb slid ever deeper through her curls, teasing her sheltered pearl with the barest suggestions of pressure and heat.

Zelda considered that perhaps modest was not the most accurate word.

“Ward it is then,” he rumble-growled. He drew his hand back and shifted his stance to slip his first and second finger down through her folds, caressing both sides of her overheated vulva at once with distressingly perfect mastery. “And  _ perhaps _ I will leave it in place for my own convenience in renewing my claim whensoever and wheresoever it please me to take you - or  _ perhaps _ I will take it away again that you must risk your ritual purity to the vagaries of mundane sheaths should you  _ happen _ to recruit a virile young  _ knight _ to your cause.”

Zelda shivered at a thought come unbidden of a story her handmaid told her once.

“Well.” Her throat felt tight and a flutter in her stomach tried to hold her tongue. But why hold back? Ganondorf was already taken off guard once by encountering sensual truths - and that  _ was _ quite the rewarding sight. She turned her head to kiss his wrist. Gratefully the quilted panel-sleeves fell no lower than his elbow, though she would have preferred not to have even the soft stormwool of his knit shirt acting as barrier either. “Suppose I  _ do _ find a  _ virile _ knight. I have heard thrilling tales of three sharing a night together. So long as he isn’t ashamed to raise his flag beside yours, it could be  _ quite _ an interesting experience.”

Ganondorf allowed only an ambiguous, wordless rumble in answer, but he bowed so close over her that his beard tickled the tip of her ear. His hands tensed and flexed against her skin, reminding her yet again of the strength coiled in his massive body. Yet his sliding fingers remained graceful and gentle, caressing through the delicate valleys of her sex to coax even more cream to well up from within her. 

Every time he touched her that way, he seemed to enjoy provoking her desire to a feverish pitch with his attentive caress. Even half-asleep, he’d lingered in his somewhat blurry adoration of her thighs and mound and labia for so long he actually drifted off more than once with his lips still pressing her flesh.

His meditative stroke seemed to drift slowly toward her gates - or else her body was opening towards his fingers. His low murmur didn’t clarify it at all: “Will you soften your oath, dear Princess? Will your oasis accept the enchantment I offer? Or does your rose still demand a foolish Trial of pain?”

“It accepts,” Zelda breathed out as she felt her face burn at a request she knew to be folly. But she had to say it. “If - if you promise not to vanish at first convenience this time. We can do a Trial of  _ Pleasure _ later. I - need your touch. The warmth of these small interludes need to last until the next time I can persuade you to it.”

He pressed her gates no further open, yet, and yet she could imagine the shape of him in her and around her. And his hand on the back of her neck felt like a promise of being wrapped in his warmth. Her fingers felt clumsy in contrast to his as she tried to use the same slow press, teasing at either side of where his flesh _should_ _be,_ under far too many layers.

She tried to be grateful that at least he wasn’t still coming to her tower in full armor and cloak every time. Nonetheless, she found herself wishing he would have continued to meet her wearing that elegant open coat over only a shirt and sirwal as he had the first time he brought her to his own suite. She suspected it would have been considered informal dress in his day, maybe even bordering on scandalous, given his usual preference for many structured layers. 

“Petition accepted,” he purred, his lips brushing against her ear. He shifted his hand when he pulled back, and the next, broad stroke arrested her all at once, dividing in three as he approached her gates. With agonising deliberation, he slipped his longest finger inside her, questing up into her as first and heartfinger continued to trace either side of her pulsing gate. He murmured some soft foreign song into her hair as he pressed his finger slowly deeper. He didn’t pulse the thrust or beckon her heat to increase inside, though he continued to caress the surface of her flesh from gate to rose, soothing and meditative. 

Zelda nuzzled against his chest automatically as she focused on his touch. At least the woolen layers were all soft brushed stormwool, and the hidden embroidery smooth silk. Narrowing her attention made the pads of his fingers feel warmer, and she thought she could feel his warm breath through her hair. The hand playing through her silk, though, seemed almost electric. She luxuriated in that skill, forgetting her own intention to keep her hand wandering in the process.

“You have - quite the way of saying,” Zelda took a moment to lick her lips and moaned quietly in pleasure, “that you want to bed me, oh my king. Not an objection! Far from it…”

“Hn,” he said, pressing his whole hand tight to her sex, reaching his finger as deep as possible. He murmured another soft measure, and then,  _ only then  _ did he draw a whorl in her depths, barely moving at first but with every circuit pressing wider.

That stirred memory - the last time their meeting gave way to passion, he’d pinned her to the rug beside the abandoned tea tray in something like rebuke. His hands caressed her everywhere as he stripped her of her dress and stays. When he slipped his finger into her then, he was growling threats and promises and grinding against her thigh. At the time, she’d paid little attention to the tease until he pressed through the widest circuits. She’d assumed the whorl was meant to coax her open - and maybe it was, in part. But he  _ certainly _ hadn’t worn a sheath for any part of that long session, and the way he opened the question of preventatives by promising he had the power to to weave a persistent spell  _ this time _ suggested he’d cast magic inside her body before.

His song, his touch, his subtle movement was a  _ spell _ to spare her the risk of conception. All the caresses leading up to it and soothing her flesh while he worked were for no other purpose than her comfort. He could have reached inside her to cast the thing ten minutes ago, and even his broad finger wouldn’t have  _ hurt _ \- that he offered it wrapped in (admittedly minor) pleasure spoke of  _ something _ beneath the pragmatic, efficient, aloof surface of her dry-humored king.

He kissed the top of her head as he wound the pivoting motion back towards center, his quiet song apparently finished. His hands relaxed. “One wonders how sturdy Hyrule builds furniture for this  _ adventurous _ Princess.”

Zelda felt her core tighten with need. He knew exactly how to tease her, when he was of a mind to. Which, granted, made it hard to know if her teases worked as well. She tried to let that idle thought go.

“It would speak ill of a master craftsman whose creation broke under the normal uses one could expect of dressing rooms.” Zelda’s ears grew hot and hoped this tease may get through. “However, other arrangements more suited to ah - certain desires - need made when one must be discreet. I have yet to test my own bed. Would it please my king to change that?”

“How demure and proper of you, dear Princess.” He chuckled darkly, sliding his hand back once more. “Five minutes ago you were suggesting I fuck into your delicate lily-white ass right here on the vanity.”

Zelda laughed in turn, squirming as his finger slipped out entirely. “Shall I show you the little shrine to  _ adventure _ , then?”

Gan paused. His voice thinned. “And they call  _ me _ the demon king.”

“I  _ could _ call you that, I suppose,” Zelda said coyly, “It’s a bit tame, though. ‘Plow me, Demon King’. Maybe ‘Ravage me Demon King’?”

“Hn,” he said, drawing back. He massaged the back of her neck idly as he licked his fingers.

Zelda tugged aside the loose panel of his arming coat that she’d been struggling with, exposing the  _ several _ buttons of his fall-front sirwal. “Or, since we finally can broach courser language, maybe ‘stop hiding your thorn away and fuck me with it, Demon King.’ Oh, oh yes, that improves the meter. Sounds much better with a ‘fuck’ in there, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure I can have no opinion what manner of obscenities might best please your tongue,” he rumbled, still chasing down hints of cream between his fingers. “Indulge my curiosity - to what catalyst do we owe the amusement of your shift towards profoundly forward manners? Also, you will have greater success if you start with the center buttons. Howsoever lustful you may become, there yet remains an order to things, dear Princess.”

Zelda focused her attention as he directed, ensuring that each button which the silk sirwal surrendered to her efforts was rewarded with her hand ‘seeking’ the next one by pointedly tracing across his hidden bulk.

“You have no opinion whatsoever, oh my king? Who has served me tea with his own hands?” Zelda grinned to herself. “No opinion between  _ ‘I wish you to work my fertile fields’ _ and  _ ‘I want you to fuck me until I lose the ability to form words’ _ ?  _ Interesting _ . And - should it really be so much a mystery, oh my king? Not half a mark ago you were holding a  _ lotus-bulb _ as you call it, which I  _ am _ quite fond of using, when time permits. Who is here to see? To judge? What use is decorum and propriety among those who have anointed each other with lips and tongues? Even when dreaming you are  _ quite _ attentive. Why shouldn’t I seek exactly what pleases me when I have no immediate or conflicting duties to attend?”

She freed the last button, but it brought her little victory. Underneath the buttons hid a second, albeit half-length, tightly laced sizing panel once cut for a thicker figure. Zelda had forgotten that. The quilted trousers underneath would likely prove to have the same problem under the smaller center panel. She huffed in frustration and glared up at him, taunt ready on her tongue to tease him for being even more complicated to undress than herself.

His averted gaze and cold expression shriveled it before she could speak. 

“By  _ definition _ I can have no opinion whatever on how you ought to shape your own concept of duty and decorum and whatever else,” he said with a shrug, dropping his damp hand to his side. “If you see no reason  _ not _ to seek sexual diversions, to befoul your tongue with curses, to fill your flesh with aesthetic delights, I cannot persuade you otherwise, nor have I any particular wish to. Amuse yourself as you like.”


	4. Pivot and Advance

His mask of indifference hardening in the middle of _another_ intimate moment was too much for her fraying temper.

“You are _indeed_ as selfish as you claim, thinking that you are the only one clever enough for patterns to be revealed.” Zelda huffed, letting go of the laces securing him from sight to reach up and grab his coat with both hands and _pull_. 

Gan only sighed.

“ _Look at me_ , damnit. You want to know what and why I do things, and ask why a thing between us changes. And when I try to find out what _you_ like, and get under your skin in the way you get under mine, you suddenly rebuff everything and go into your own council even deeper.”

“ _However_ ,” he interrupted, heat bleeding away from the hand on her neck, even as the spiritlight under his open arming coat doubled in brilliance. “By the same measure that whatever guides your personal code is none of my concern, by the same law which prevents me persuading you to change it, _you_ cannot persuade _me_ out of _mine_ . Where I evidently mean so little to you that I am not even counted as an audience to what unfolds between us, for my part I consider _you_ present and invested with all possible liberty and spirit to see and judge _my_ part in these shallow bedgames at any time it amuses you to do it.”

“ _Shallow-? How dare,”_ she cried, fists shaking with rage. _“_ You want to know what changed? What was the _catalyst?_ It’s that with every day we worked together to map the effects of the Twilight advance, I had to wrestle with the truth that I was growing to _like you_ . That I want to discover the things that make you show even one more scrap of interest in me. And maybe I want you to stop thinking I’m some treasure on a perfect pedestal. I’m - no, I _was_ \- royalty. I dealt with that expectation _every day of my life_.”

“I have some familiarity with the demands of the crown,” he began.

Zelda yanked on his coat again, harder, forcing him to bow low or fight her in earnest. ”You know how I spent the day I was to be crowned queen? _Handing my throne to a nightmare._ To keep my people safe. And then you show up and begin war planning. You gave me _hope_ , Ganondorf. But now? You won’t even let me help defend my own land. You order me to my room like I’m nothing but a petulant child in your eyes. You lay the sins of my people at my feet _constantly_ . How am I to even know them? All I know is what is written - and we both know from _your own writing_ that history is written by those who conquered.”

Gan opened his mouth to speak, but managed barely even the first syllable of her name.

“And? What is worse? _I can’t fix it._ There is _no one_ here to carry out orders I can’t give, no one to hear any lesson I might teach, no leverage to press upon to correct the course of my country should it ever flourish again. But you are here, a warm and sensual lover - and this is the _one_ comfort you are willing to share, so I will take it and damn the consequence-! And damnit anyways, but for some godsforsaken reason _I like you,_ you _insufferable_ ass.”

He seized her in his vast hands and pulled her off the vanity to claim her lips with his. Heated, passionate, needful, seeking her tongue and catching her lip, his breath hot and short. He made no effort whatever to explain himself, only crushed her to his chest and caged her hips against his trim waist, supporting her entire weight as he kissed her - and _kissed_ her - and _kissed her._

Zelda melted into the solidness of him, from the way his kisses teased and demanded and claimed her to the breathless dizzying whirl of fullness and need that left her light headed.

He tasted of clove and honey. He smelled of spices.

Between one kiss and the next she tried to draw breath, and found that she had quite forgotten how to. And she didn’t quite recall how her arms had worked their way around his neck.

“Please,” she begged, panting as she learned how to breathe again. “Need - just a moment.”

She licked her lips as she rested her forehead against his cheek. She squeezed him gently with her legs - it felt _right_ to have him there.

He sighed mightily. He shifted his grasp to wrap his hand under her hips rather than around, hitching her a little higher, helping her better wrap her thighs around his waist and rest her weight on the ledge of his hips. He slid his other hand up her back so slowly, as he too fought to master his breath. He threaded his fingers under her loose queue to cradle the back of her head and guide her to tuck her face against his thick neck, under the ticklish ledge of his beard. 

“Star and Sand, how I want you,” he murmured, his actual words barely intelligible through the soothing rumble of his dark voice.

His hands remained chaste.

Zelda nodded in agreement, and immediately regretted the ticklishness of his soft, lightly oiled beard. She suppressed a giggle by way of tucking her head even further into his neck and pressing her nose nearly flush to his skin. 

“I - want you, too,” she said against his flesh. “And call me selfish, but I won’t be sated by your body alone either, oh my king.”

She wrapped her arms tighter around his neck. And used what leverage she had to press herself as tightly as she could against him.

“Sa’ikhusa,” he rumbled softly. “More intoxicating than majir _and you know it_ , and I _know_ what you’re about and - and-”

Zelda set her teeth on his neck, cutting him off before he could finish talking himself out of the tryst.

His cry turned into a low moan, and he tipped his head back, exposing his throat to her nips and kisses. He kept the edges of his beard carefully sculpted along the ledge of his jaw, disguising several old scars between the rising wedges, but his lips and cheeks and the soft underside of his jaw he shaved so close she could lick the salt from his skin without finding any rough places at all, even where the scars wrapped under the bone and into the shadows under his jaw. Any touch there made his breath shorten, soft kisses made him shiver, teeth and tongue made him moan. 

“ _Zelda,_ ” he panted, caressing the back of her neck. “Sa’Deasa - how you tempt me. Here? Fireside? Bed?”

“Bed,” she breathed and nipped at the soft place just under his jaw. “If - if you can wait that long, oh my king.”

Zelda didn’t wait for an answer before catching his neck in her teeth again and began suckling, seeking to draw out his salt and spice by main force of necessary, and gentle convincing if possible. She tightened her thighs to rock her hips against him and delighted in the feel of being even a hair's-breadth closer to him.

“Let me tell you of _waiting,_ ” he growled, tilting his head away to let her continue if she chose, yet also bring his lips closer to her ear as he turned toward the door. “Let me tell you of a plain of fathomless night, and immovable shadows in every direction. Let me tell you of an age confined to a faceted void no larger than my reach. Let me tell you of attempting to measure the measureless by the patterns of meditation and memory and magic, one after another after another until the darkness scoured all meaning from the idea of numbers. Let me tell you of waiting with my memories and my shattered dreams and a bloody blade for the gods to explain themselves. Let me tell you how long I have _waited_ to return, for vengeance, for desire, to reclaim what is mine _by Trial and by word and by right_.”

His long stride carried them from the dressing room to the bedchamber with a steady, rolling grace. He did not hurry. He did not need to. His steps consumed the world. He had to bow a little through the door, but by the time he spoke of _possession_ , he was bowing even deeper to lay her on the bed. 

Gan rested a knee on the edge of the mattress as he ran his hands over her body, smoothing the cutaway satin overgown and the soft muslin beneath it. His broad fingers teased along the hem of the satin, then shifted up to unclasp the ritual girdle. “Let me tell you of _waiting_ for every secret letter, let me tell you of longing _from childhood_ to behold the famous beauty and hear the golden voice and possess the sublime blessings of the magic princess of our imperialist neighbors.”

He pulled the jeweled cord from under her hips and tossed the sacred garment onto the ledge of the headboard. He unclasped the pectoral crest from her overgown, and laid it beside the pillow. “Let me tell you of _waiting_ as decades burned in the fires of war and in the struggle to _end_ that war.”

He tugged at the placket and the hidden hooks of the overgown, peeling it open inch by inch. “Let me tell you of _waiting_ , hunting the heart of the sacred maiden, year after year after year. Jewels and horses and bright steel. Oaths and enchantments. Spice and sweet and savory to grace their table, science and poetry to fill their library.”

He fell quiet as he threaded a hand under her back, lifting and guiding and helping her untangle herself from the purple satin. He stroked his hands down her body, one long caress from shoulders to knees. He shook his head, and stood, shrugging out of his heavy quilted arming coat. He laid it over the footboard instead of with her things. “Let me tell you of _waiting_ with my eyes on the borders of death and darkness to behold their spirit crossing the veil.” 

He leaned against the lower bedpost to shed first his boots, and then the silk sirwal, and the quilted short trousers beneath that. “Let me tell you of _waiting_ for any smallest opportunity, any shard of secrets, any piece of enchantment that I could use to carve a door back into the daylight to confront them, to rescue them from the perfidy of their guard, to return to their side and _make_ them reveal the truth of their heart, for good or ill.”

He fell quiet again, flexing his hands. The spiritlight of his long wounds shone through his tight woolen shirt from sternum to navel, through his black linen breeks from the crest of one hip to well above the other. He slid his hand along the carved canopy rail, leaning against it to loom over her, his body blocking the hearthlight. The low gleam of the crystal lamp and the dim twilight reflected in the topaz cabochon on his brow, and in the intense gold of his piercing eyes, but the rest of him became velvet shadow. “Let me tell you of _waiting_ with my truths tearing at my throat when you did not know me, when you were not Zelda Sophia Karsooda Saievaitha Hyrule at all, but a brilliant woman of deep-rooted strength and dauntless courage, even more radiant of form and spirit than the princess of my childhood dreams.”

“You reveal all of this _now_ , oh my king,” Zelda said as she stared up into his intense eyes and rested a hand over her heart. “To make mockery of a lover’s tease? Or is there a deeper pattern you desire to reveal in your thoughts and heart? You have come now, after so long - I asked only because so few would remain patient after suffering so much.”

“Hn. I am not a beast in mindless rut,” he rumbled.

Zelda reached out to rest her hand on the edge of his hip. “And here you are. You _have_ the throne of your enemy, and a different sacred maiden. One who has no guard to deceive them. Who _does_ reveal their heart. And yet a war is still on. Tell me, my king. Why is it not enough? Why does this wound shine strongest when you are - like this?”

His bright eyes slid shut, and the bedframe creaked as he rested more of his weight against the canopy rail. “I am the king of light and shadow, Zelda. Of those living in the world of light and those shades consigned to the land of the dead. I am no longer a thread of one or the other, but _both_. What you see of light bleeding from my spirit where these blows should have slain me in the moments I hunger most - the mystery of perceiving the spirit belonged to my people. How you have even a measure of it I cannot guess.”

Zelda shivered and tightened her grip on his hip. She gently pulled at him as her knees fell to either side in invitation. Her other hand traced a line from her thigh towards her core, and finally reached it up to him to welcome him into her arms if he so chose to accept it.

“Let us know that mystery some other time, oh my king,” Zelda breathed out. “Come sate your hunger, at least for a while. The time of _waiting_ is over, and I hope to anchor you in the world of the living for as long as I can.”


	5. Afternoon Cantata

Ganondorf opened his golden eyes, gazing down at her with an unfathomable intensity for several long moments. He  _ could _ move swiftly and decisively - but so often remained deliberate and withdrawn, the sharp fiery passion of the long-ago Prince transformed into the fierce glowing furnace of an indomitable King. Even as he let his free hand drift to the laces of his long breeks, he tugged one tail slowly free of the knot, then the other. He did not hurry. He loosened the cords, he hooked a thumb under the waistband, pulling the dark cloth away from his trim waist.

Zelda propped herself up on her side and helped the garment slip down the ledge of his hip and his corded thigh. The deep seams spoiling the smooth yoke and waistband betrayed how the fullness had been taken in, how the compact bulk of her king had once been more generous. She wondered why he did not have his servants make him fresh, but continued to wear the antiques of his former life. 

He surrendered the breeks to her demand, and bowed to grasp the side tie of her bodice. He tugged each tail the same way, and loosed the hidden clasp of the underbust band that pulled in the fullness of the cloth. He stepped free of the breeks and let them puddle on the floor as her bodice fell open, and offered his hand - leverage to rise to her knees.

Zelda kicked off her slippers and kilted up her skirts to keep them loose. She let him gather the muslin in his broad hands as he too knelt on the bed. The frame was heavy rock maple, the dense wool mattress supported by dozens of slender beams instead of the more common rope net, and still it creaked ever so softly when he added his full weight beside her. 

He lifted her gown free and smoothed the cloth, reaching to drape it over the headboard. He handled both petticoats the same way, delicate and careful, though his heavy silk loincloth strained mightily to keep his desire  _ somewhat  _ discreet. He raked his eyes over her body, and even with the hearthlight behind him, the dim ambience of twilight and the little crystal lamp on her desk revealed his lopsided grin.

“I will admit, the early absence of that  _ one _ single undergarment is… now seems startlingly erotic. Another time though,” he rumbled, gesturing for her hand. Gan seemed to like unbuttoning her gloves and plucking at the fingertips to slide the silk off without ever bunching the cloth. He did it the same way every time, if he removed her gloves at all.

He laid the gloves with the ritual girdle rather than the gown, orderly even in the pursuit of passion. He loosed the stocking ribbons, and began on her stays, though he let her help untie the shoulder straps and loosen the spiral cord this time. He once again refused to lift it over her head once loose, but unravelled the entire cord to peel it open.

This, he tossed toward the foot of the bed, heaped atop his arming coat. 

Again though, he smoothed the wisp-thin mistlinen of her short chemise, as if he needed to banish the deep wrinkles before he could think of removing it. His fingers lingered at the hem, teasing her bare hip and thigh, taunting her with his thumbs brushing the edge of her curls. He bowed over her to claim another kiss, soft and slow.

She kissed him in return, urging him to deepen his passion, inviting his tongue to do more than tease her lips. She wound her fists in the soft knit cloth of the shirt he refused to surrender, tugging and dragging at it - and clinging desperately for balance as he bowed deeper, pushing her back, well off balance.

Gan did not slip a hand under her back this time, but planted one fist on the bed, wrapping the other in her chemise as the pull of the earth finished what his advancing kiss began. He leaned over her to carry his kisses down her bare throat, to her shoulder, tracing the arch of her collarbone. 

Zelda mirrored his wandering kisses with her fingertips, wishing she could tease his sweaty skin instead of the soft stormwool. As much as she enjoyed how the tight knit shirt flattered his strength, she missed the loose open placket of his full linen shirts, with their few ties and broad collar, where she could at least slip her hands under the cloth he refused to surrender.

He shifted his stance as she spread her thighs, tucking his knees under hers. His skin radiated heat, and a thin sheen of sweat already graced his thighs as he rocked back, caressing her through the chemise. He seemed to be struggling to draw deeper breaths as he cupped her breasts and licked his lips, staring down at her.

And then?

Ganondorf grasped the delicate cloth in his fists and snapped the threads binding the rolled neckline. A second fierce yank split the cloth. He resettled and tore it halfway to her navel, his grin broadening as he exposed her breasts. 

“Hn,” he said, pulling his lip between his teeth, bright eyes crinkled in amusement.

She felt suddenly helpless, as no doubt he meant her to. It was ridiculous - she was only marginally more naked than a moment ago, and she’d exposed her sex to him in the dressing room well over an hour ago. But something about the raw edges of the cloth, of the subtle tension of stockings with little else, of the chill air teasing her bare breasts while the mistlinen still tugged at her waist brought a strange and savage intensity into the bed with them.

She felt the urge to cover herself, though it was far too late, and she fumbled to give her hands purpose, sliding over warm wool and what little of his flesh she could reach.

He released the sundered garment without touching her naked flesh, but his eyes consumed her as he  _ hurried _ to unravel the knots of his loincloth. He grunted as he scrambled to free his throbbing cock, and he did not even bother to unwind it from his thigh, but let it fall as soon as he had his staff in hand. He stroked himself only twice, not in a manner of pleasure but of rearranging flesh - and reached for her hips.

Gan groaned as her thighs slid over his, parting wide to embrace his bulk as he hauled her into his lap. He teased his burning tip through her curls, rocking his hips to press their bodies together. He bowed over her as his heat slid against hers, bright eyes narrowed to mere slashes of gold. He teased her with the threat and promise of his heavy cock, pressing against her gates longer and more firmly every time, panting in desire.

Careful and decorous - until he had her in nothing but circlet and stockings and ravaged chemise. Until he gathered her in his arms and pulled her onto his throbbing crown with a resonant moan. His ridge pushed against her gates, rebuking her for thinking her hunger was enough to make her ready for his regal girth.

Zelda realized a part of the pattern he enjoyed - wanting to enhance the difference in their respective size. Wanting to feel as large as possible, maybe? Or was it still for her advantage, to feel just as small as she unquestionably was? Or to give her a moment to change her mind? 

Which was  _ not _ going to happen. She liked feeling a little helpless for him. And the memory of him sheathed within her was intoxicating. Her sex pulsed against his, dripping and hungry, but still too tight.

She wrapped her hands into his knit shirt once more and pulled. She had meant to bury her nose in his chest, and mostly only managed to grind her gates against him even more completely. 

“Please, my king,” she moaned, “I  _ ache _ to have you.”

“ _ Ahh _ vo’jachelet,” he moaned, flexing his thighs rock-hard. His cock tensed and pushed harder - and popped the ridge past the fragile gates with a suddenness that made them both gasp. He groaned and held himself rigid and still, though his fingers dug into her hips, betraying his hunger to pull her deeper. It could not be fair to say  _ he _ rested, as his muscles relaxed not at all, but he gave her three long beats to catch her breath, and lifted her hips as he rocked his forward and spread his thighs under hers, shifting her against the bed with his crown still resting inside her. 

Then he thrust. 

Neither deep nor hard, but a measured press, slipping a little more of his heat inside her. He drew back with the same deliberation, just to the tension of ridge against the inside of the gate. He panted and groaned, and he clawed at her hips and waist, tearing the chemise further. He bowed over her, lower and lower as he rocked himself deeper and deeper, stretching her so achingly wide.

She pulled at his shirt until she could slip her hands around his neck and pull him even further down. He groaned in agony, brushing a damp kiss over her brow. He was too tall, even with his back arched, for her to have his lips and his cock at once, and he seemed to sigh over it every time the limits of flesh reminded them of it. 

To be fair, so did she. 

He slid a hand up her body, caressing her breast only briefly. He kissed her brow again and nuzzled into her hair as he slipped his hand under her neck to offer his arm as a pillow. The bed creaked when he rocked his hips to bury even a little more of himself inside her, and he offered a shuddering sigh into her hair that made a sudden flood of silk well up from her depths and make an embarrassingly vulgar wet  _ squelch _ . 

He hummed in approval and pulled his hips back, retreating all the way to the gate, drawing out the embarrassing sound - and pulling a desperate babble of incoherent objections from her lips.

“ _ Hungry _ , my dear Princess? Sing for me, and I will fill you,” he purred into her hair, kneading her hip with his other hand. He made her tilt and arch against him - and only then did he thrust back into her depths, steady and strong. He did not tease her into anticipating and flowering for the embrace this time, but opened her with his intoxicating girth.

Dazzling, many-colored light flared in the velvet darkness of his shoulder. She could barely breathe. Her back arched without her consciousness anywhere near it, or maybe anywhere at all. She might have howled something, for her throat felt raw, and he was moaning into her hair. He allowed her only that one beat to struggle after reason, and then he moved again, shattering her thoughts completely.

Blurry spangled darkness and heat and the chill ticklishness of undignified fleshly noises in her ears. None of her masked amusements in the shrines of love had been like that - even when her sex drooled for pleasure, she had always been the graceful one, serene and commanding, and her blindfolded knightly devotees had adored that. She had enjoyed taking the role of the sublime spirit, guiding them to experience sex as an elevated spiritual mystery.

Vulgar sticky slippery wet things belonged to the  _ other _ sort of shrine, which more than one handmaiden enjoyed immensely, and which delights she’d begun to toy with directing. She had shied away from tasting the risk of being the subject, embarrassed by the very thought of enduring inherently graceless submission, even in elaborate, secret make-pretend.

And here she lay in the arms of the demon king, clinging desperately to his strength as he plowed into her cunt with slowly-building vigor.

“ _ Esha’vo _ , sing for me,” he moaned, raw and achingly intense.

His girth stroked a deep thrill inside her that no one had ever kindled before him. Even the most blessed knights, pleasant and warm and aesthetic, had barely teased a ticklish hint that  _ something _ else lay just beyond her grasp. Wearing one of the jewels in her ass had helped enhance that tease,  _ if _ she could get the angle  _ just _ right, and  _ if _ her clit already ached for its share of attention.

The challenge of Ganondorf’s cock went beyond  _ filling _ and into madness. Taut, trembling waves of electric tension rippled out from that hidden mystery when he ground his burning crown deep inside her. She tried to embrace it, to ride any one of those waves to paradise, but he kept  _ moving _ , changing it just enough - delightful, but not  _ enough _ \- and then-!

“ _ Oh _ \- no -  _ no, _ not yet -  _ sa’deasa _ \- no,” he moaned, freezing mid-stroke. It was too late - his cock throbbed mightily as he whimpered and swore, turning his face against the mattress to muffle his cries as he came.

Zelda raced after her breath, stretching her senses to try and discern anything in the steady heat. Sometimes, she could mark the bloom, even with a sheath to catch a devotee’s ‘offerings’, and last time she had felt him cum more than once, and luxuriated in the dripping flood after.

“ _ Zelda vo’jachelet _ ,” he groaned, shifting his weight to cover her, still buried inside her and twitching delightfully as he wound her into his embrace. “Star and Sand, I want you,  _ I want you. _ ”

She laughed when she could find the wind for it, petting his hair. “A little late, don’t you think? I’m pretty sure you already have me, oh my king.”

He groaned in agony or maybe rebuke, and nuzzled into her hair again, murmuring something in his mother tongue, too blurry to make sense of.

It felt wonderful.


	6. Light and Shadow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We can have a little bit of light(ha!) bondage. As a treat.

Reason returned well after wind, but Ganondorf drove it away again soon after with his masterful caress. His hands claimed and commanded and reshaped her body into a shivering mess of longing. He left her in her stockings and ravaged chemise, but he tenderly shifted her ragged braids aside as he moved her deeper into the bed. 

He didn’t right their angle, but remained between her and the warm hearthlight, dragging pillows down to heap under her hips. He wrapped her legs around his waist and curled around her in an achingly tight stone position to kiss her neck and suck at her breasts, and knead her neck and shoulders, and scramble her wits with his strong fingers in her hair.

She tried to tug at his shirt, and she begged for more of his skin. He refused her, and he brought teeth and taunts into his torments. He threatened to ravage her, to claim her, to ruin her for anything less than the Sun’s Thorn, and he chuckled darkly when she dared him to try.

Zelda  _ thought _ he’d pinned her last time, when a healing session turned into tea in his suite turned into sweaty sex on the floor… and the table… and the bench… and nearly every other surface in his rooms. 

He caught her wrists in a vicious grip and shoved her hands back against the bed. He loomed over her and growled. “The captive princess would be  _ wise _ to refrain from taunting the beast, lest she find herself-”

“Fucked stupid? Promises promises,” she chided him, though the effect was somewhat spoiled by squeaking at the end when he forced her arms up above her head.

“Provoke me at your peril woman,” he growled, and licked her ear. “I  _ will _ chain you to this bed and take you at my leisure, my wretched, whimpering,  _ helpless _ prisoner to ravish whensoever and howsoever I please.”

Zelda sucked a tight breath through her teeth. “You like that do you? Using your power to overwhelm-? To conquer-?”

He chuckled darkly, and snapping, flickering light spun above them. He nipped at her ear as one thread and another of delicate lacework lightning struck toward the stone wall, to the bedframe and canopy and posts. “I think the more relevant matter is  _ you  _ like it, my dear princess. I can smell your honey dripping in anticipation already.”

“Nonsense,” she said weakly, as a faint electric tingle encircled her wrists. He slid his hands down her bare arms, but though she tugged and squirmed, she could not budge  _ her _ hands even an inch. It didn’t hurt, and even when she pulled hard it felt more like a sun-warmed bangle caught around her wrist than anything.

“Shall I spread your thighs and drink the truth now-? Or shall I pour you full and watch you overflow with milk and honey, a quivering, dripping mess for me?”

“ _ Um _ ,” she said, brilliantly.

He licked her neck, and threads of light shot down from the captive little tempest under the bed canopy to coil around her legs, snapping and crackling over her stockings from thigh to ankle. He did not even  _ need _ to sing, or to gesture, or to speak any word of power to weave enchantments, if he didn’t care to. The immensity of the magic under his command implied by his readiness to tap that power for no other reason than to spice a tryst was more than a little frightening.

As he no doubt meant it to be.

He skimmed a hand down her side, over her thigh. He wrapped the meat of his hand around her knee and  _ pushed _ , up and out, guiding her slowly as wide as she could go, and when he released his grasp, the coils of light  _ held her there _ .

Zelda tugged and wriggled experimentally, and he traced loops over the top of her stocking, to bare flesh, and back again. He kissed her ear just as tenderly, just as teasingly. He kissed her cheek and nuzzled against her neck, chuckling darkly when his ticklish beard made her squirm.

“My king  _ please _ ,” she gasped, struggling to pull away howsoever little her enchanted chains allowed.

“Hn. Please  _ what _ , my dear impatient Princess?”

“I - I can’t  _ move _ ,” she squeaked, embarrassed at herself and the racing of her heart.

“That would be the  _ point _ ,” he purred, drawing back to nuzzle his nose alongside hers. “Contain that bright mischief and teach the clever Princess a little lesson about  _ what happens _ to willful, wanton captives who lift their skirts in a foolish bid to subdue the demon king, yeah?”

Zelda whimpered, mind whirling uselessly as he shifted his balance and skimmed his other hand down to lift her other knee. Pinned was too mild a word. Helpless was too mild a word. Her fruitless wriggling had pulled the torn chemise askew, exposing one breast to the cold air again - and which he  _ helpfully _ evened out by drawing the mistlinen aside of the other.

He rocked back on his heels to look down at her with the most wicked of grins. He tweaked and tugged her nipples, apparently amused to reshape them tight and high, to make her flinch and squeak. He made it even worse, licking the pads of his thumbs and massaging her idiot flesh to create a visceral illusion of suckling. She knew better, she could see him doing it, she could see the wicked mirth in his golden eyes, and still he made her body  _ ache _ for more of something she didn’t even have. 

He tormented her until she whimpered, and then he dragged his fingers from shoulder to hip, possessive and consuming. He massaged the join of hip and thigh, working in a gradual looping progression into her sodden curls to caress her vulnerable sex.

“Please,” she begged, unable to shape anything more complicated.

He chuckled darkly. “An enchanting landscape, Hyrule. I could ravish and despoil her for  _ ages _ and still my thorn would rise to prick her again. Does the Princess begin to regret her folly?”

“ _ Um, _ ” she squeaked, struggling to claw her reason into something like order with his fingers massaging her labia and taunting her gates with skimming  _ close _ , with parting the tender flesh on either side until the tension teased her gates wider. “Please my king - I - a moment, please, I can’t-!”

He snorted in amusement, wrapping his hands around her thighs again, his fingers dimpling the flesh. “You will take me even deeper like this, you know.”

“ _ Oh no _ ,” she breathed.

“Oh  _ yes _ . Your tight little Hylian cunt has resisted my glory, but no more. I  _ will _ have all of you, and I will have you _ tonight _ ,” he rumbled, bowing low to tease her nipple with a flick of his wicked tongue. “You think you know  _ full? _ You will  _ beg _ me for mercy when I’ve plunged my cock  _ halfway _ to the hilt.”

Zelda whimpered, shivering in a new fear. She had been certain she’d taken more of him than that. Maybe not all, but most, definitely. There was no possible way his thrusts had been so shallow  _ every _ time - he filled her more thoroughly than she had ever known she could  _ be _ filled. The thought that there could be  _ even more _ \- that she was trapped and helpless until he was done with whatever use he wanted to make of her - that  _ everything _ might have been a ruse from the beginning to lure her into his power - chilled her blood.

“Cold, Princess? Let me just -  _ help _ you with that.” He clicked his tongue in censure, and broadened into a long, hot, savory lick from nipple to neck, nearly to her ear. Which, of course, he followed with blowing cold wind over, and laughing when she shrieked.

“My king, oh my king please, I can’t do it, forgive me,” she cried.

“Hn,” he said, sliding his hands up to circle her waist again, nuzzling her neck. “Nothing to forgive, my dear princess.”

“But I  _ can’t _ , it will be too much, I can’t bear it, this - this mask will be too much my king,” she begged, scrambling for words he would believe, that would reach the goodness in his heart, that would persuade him to relent.

He paused, and kissed her neck softly, his beard ticklish. “Mask-?”

“Oh  _ no _ \- in the name of the Three - please my king,  _ say _ it is  _ mesvut _ ? A mask? Or - or  _ sirvah _ ? Please?”

“Hn,” he said kissing her neck again. “Close.  _ Mesvu _ is softer, with a hard stop only for possessives. The shape is a little different in the second, difficult for Hylians:  _ cyrba. _ ”

“Sirbah?”

He chuckled. “Closer. Usually it would have a prefix. Some poets would say of this  _ k’cyrba _ , or  _ cha’cyrba _ , or  _ sal’cyrba _ \- flower-games or moon-games or - that does not translate well.  _ Lovegames _ is not right but - it will drop as skyfire into my thoughts in four hours and you will have forgotten. There are as many ways of speaking of entanglements as there are ways for threads to cross, and as many patterns of crossing as stars in the heavens, Zelda.”

“Sorry,” she began.

“Don’t be - that you  _ tried _ the Geld’o without  _ once _ having heard it is - perhaps a few dozen Hylians of my acquaintance ever made the attempt to learn any at all,” he said with a shrug. The crackling light crawling idly under the bed canopy dimmed, then one by one, the threads began to vanish.

Zelda shivered again and licked her lips nervously. Her pulse raced still, but the sharp pivot in his tone was promising. She felt herself warm at the thought that it  _ was _ a game - and felt her cheeks burn at the near-promise that it was.

“I won’t forget. Promise you will share it once you recall the word you mean? I have too many holes in my grasp of the language,” Zelda said as she took a calming breath. She tested her wrist bindings and found them to be just as unmoving. “I - oh my king, I would  _ very much _ like to know if you play at  _ mesvu sal’sirbah.  _ I wouldn’t be able to bear it if your heart has turned away from me so quickly - or if you - if-”

“Hn. I keep my oaths,” he interrupted, his voice a low purring rumble against her skin. He stroked her side, chaste and gentle, though she was mostly naked and bound and halfway in his lap. “Even the wicked ones, even in sal’cyrbah.”

Zelda drew a sharp breath. “Then - I  _ am _ curious. I haven’t - it is new. I would happily learn this pattern but - what if  _ mesvu _ is - too much?”

“Then perhaps the Princess must beg me to remove it,” he whispered in her ear.

Zelda blushed hard and felt her core clench in need without first asking her leave. “Then - well, what  _ is _ about to happen to willful, wanton captives who dared tempt the demon king? Surely you don’t mean to...um …?”

“Fuck you stupid?  _ Absolutely _ ,” he purred.


	7. Jewels and Honey

Ganondorf did not have the mercy to be swift.

Apparently.

He played his hands and lips over her body, using his magic to keep her helpless, her squirming fruitless. He made her squeak and whimper and cry out, and he made her blood run hot and cold. He teased her with suggestions and ticklish feather-light touches and demanded she beg for him to leave the mark of his teeth on her skin, to suck at her breasts until her clit ached in raw jealousy, to lay his heat into the valley of her swollen cunt and soothe her forbidden hunger for her enemy. 

That part of the mask hurt - but somehow this time, with the dim sidelight emphasizing the subtle creases at the corners of his eyes, it seemed like there was something deeper to it. He was taunting her with his allusions to the game of conqueror and captive, but he was also taunting  _ himself _ . His own capture and imprisonment had wounded him deeply, and she represented an enemy to him even more than the reverse.

But he was so tender, even in his conquest. Zelda was certain within ten minutes she would never again be able to endure even so minor and innocent a thing as his fingertip brushing her  _ earlobe _ without being reduced to a heap of quivering jelly. But how could such a touch  _ ever _ be considered innocent when one has firsthand experience of it being employed with such skill?

Zelda tried to think of some of the other innocent ways he touched her, which proved to be in vain when he again trapped his shaft between them and slid his hands up her sides to cradle her bound wrists. He ground against her, growling about how his girth increased for every whimper, how she was weaving her own doom.

“You  _ tease _ , merciless king. You make me ache in emptiness,” she moaned, arching under him as he stroked back, wondering if she could fit her gates against his crown and coax him to fulfill his promises sooner rather than later.

“Do I now-? Tell me Princess, of this curious ache. Shall I slip jeweled weights into your grotto until your soft flesh swells in abundance?”

The emptiness in her core cried out in want, and Zelda felt certain any filling at all would tip her over the edge. And yet, the promise of something that would make her body swell invited the thought of  _ him _ making her swell. She felt dizzy with need.

“I want- that is - if-if it pleases my merciless king,” Zelda struggled to arrange her words. “I can’t bear being so empty.”

He grinned down at her. He shifted, trailing warm fingertips over cool skin, doubling her craving to have his heat wrapped around her. He teased her labia, sliding his hand down beside his shaft. “Amber for a  _ modest _ beginning? Rubies for stoking the furnace? Diamonds for pure sublime  _ weight _ ?”

She worried her lip between her teeth, shivering in the wake of his touch. Her hips rocked against the pressure, her body seeking pleasure whether her mind was ready or not. 

“How many, I wonder, will it require to stretch a delicate princess so wide I might - just reach in,” he rumbled, drawing his hips back only to wedge his hand under his shaft and slide a finger - or perhaps two - up into her cunt. “Dip my  _ entire hand _ into her treasury and pluck a bauble out to admire?”

“M-my king makes such  _ s-suggestions,”  _ Zelda stammered as her focus on his filling touch tried to consume her. “D-don’t want  _ modest _ . W-want  _ full _ . Rubies? Amber and diamond both? Oh, please my king, whatever will bring that - that one thing, that  _ unf _ you keep  _ teasing _ .”

She curled her legs around him to bring him any inch closer she could manage.

“Beware the wicked wish,” he purred, drawing a whorl inside her that  _ stayed drawn _ . He shifted back, and drew another, and the vague sense of  _ somethingness _ seemed to move deeper. Again, and again he caressed her from within, but even so, he teased. The vaguely ticklish, yearning feel of  _ almostness _ persisted, very much like the ear straining after a fragment of song. “I will make you moon-round, I will make you overflow. I will make you mine, I will make you  _ beg _ to serve as a vessel for my pleasure.”

Zelda’s toes curled in delight. Her body was feeling so many things and she reveled in each of them. There was something deliciously scandalous about being made to beg - her! Royalty! Wanton -  _ and pregnant? But he cast magic specifically to prevent it…? _ \- and needing more. 

“How does my king wish me to beg?” Zelda felt her face grow hot with embarrassment imagining herself thus.

“I want you to beg with voice and flesh and spirit.” His fingers dipped deeper inside her, and again there welled up the sense of  _ almost _ something. He laughed at her. He withdrew his hand and made her watch him suck the silk from his fingers as he taunted her - and then he slipped his fingers inside to do it again. “I want you to sing for me, and I want your river to flood for me. I want to fill you with jewels and milk and honey until you spill all your treasures for me. I want to thrust  _ deep _ into your quivering, dripping, helpless cunt when you cum.”

“Oh.  _ Oh my, _ ” Zelda moaned at that  _ something _ presence and flexed around his fingers. The eroticism of what he wanted from her was dizzying.

“Indeed,” he rumbled, pulsing his fingers through her gates. The vague sense of presence and weight increased yet again - but it was not enough.

“Please, oh my king. Please make me sing. I want jewels to fill me. I need your milk in me. I  _ need _ you in me. Oh please, that thing you do feels so - so -  _ thing,” _ Zelda breathed the last as she chased after that delirious presence and wallowed in the heat of his hands on her sodden gates. “ _ Please _ .”

“One wonders  _ which _ thing it is this sodden Princess yearns for,” he purred, slipping his fingers out again. His whole hand glistened and dripped, and he sucked  _ three _ fingers into his mouth this time. He seemed amused to catch her watching. He caressed her spread thighs. He wrapped his hands under her hips. 

“ _ Perhaps _ her treasury of words has drained away while she coveted diamonds. Come,” he said with a wicked grin, lifting her hips up -  _ up _ \- from grinding against his heavy shaft to being splayed wide and vulnerable right in his face, until her shoulders barely even rested on the mattress. His rumbling voice teasing through her curls made her depths clench - and suddenly the vague presence wasn’t vague anymore. He nuzzled against her mound and it was impossible to say if the shifting weight inside was her own body adjusting, or if he dropped another heavy jewel inside her. 

“Flower for me, Princess, and I will pour you full of poetry,” he purred - and kissed the aching ridge where her clit hid from the world to yearn in secret. He dragged his tongue over her folds and kissed her again. And again. He sucked on her swollen labia. He licked every little valley. He kissed her deeply, passionately, feasting on her sex.

Zelda sang for him. Not loudly. Not all at once. A sharp breath here. A low moan there. Staccato panting of her pleasure. A loud growl that started in her throat and traveled to her hips and she was trying to grind her sodden mound against his benedictions. A note started at midrange, and climbed until her voice could fill the sparse room no more and it echoed back at them, and Zelda’s thighs quivered and twitched against Ganondorf’s cheeks.

And Ganondorf still did not cease his ministrations. 

He wrapped his hands under her thighs and dug his fingers into her sides, into her stomach, kneading and reshaping her body to his delight. When he rocked pressure between navel and mound, she felt it all the way into her core. It teased at the  _ almost _ feeling again, which made little sense, for the  _ almostness _ was deep inside and his fingers were rolling over her sweaty and sex-slick skin. He suckled tenderly, and when her thighs quivered, he purred in approval - which made the electric thrum in her bones vibrate harder, which in turn made her thighs clench helplessly.

Something moved, startling and slick.

“ _ Hnnn _ ,” he said, and nuzzled against her for a long, suckling kiss. He massaged her mound as he kissed her clit.

Her thighs clenched against another thrum of pleasure, and the startling slickness welled up again as her breath caught. A faint click caught her attention -  _ what could be clicking? _

He stole her wits back with a little nod and a long, broad lick.

Again, slippery ticklish movement - and that time she could tell for  _ certain _ the sensation rose from within her when he kneaded her flesh. A sharp beat - and her ears caught another subtle  _ click _ . She couldn’t make sense of it - not with his lips and tongue scrambling her thoughts to a helpless slurry of need. The yearning redoubled, and what was left of her mind flooded with the visceral memories of him moving inside her. She longed for something, anything to soothe the ache. She cried for him to fill the throbbing emptiness with his fingers, with more jewels, with  _ something _ .

He did precisely the opposite.

Because _ of course _ he did.

He pulled back, denying her the embrace of his mouth, the pressure of his chin. He even slid his hands back to her hips. His low and wicked rumble teased her tender clit with his hot breath and his lips and beard tickling through her sodden curls. “Does the Princess beg for mercy-? Shall I stop? Has she had enough of kisses?”

“You - wicked - wicked man,” Zelda panted and licked her lips. She tried to wipe the sweat off her face, which instantly reminded her of how impossible that was. She tried to piece together his question and make sense of why he’d stopped. “Can’t - can’t  _ think _ with - with thing you’re doing. Need. Need  _ you _ . Please. Please Ga - my king. Please, please fill me. Need you. Want. Want to feel  _ you _ in me. On me. Please.”

Zelda tried to flex her legs for emphasis. Tried to draw him closer. Tried to do anything that would make him  _ touch _ her again. She whined pitifully at the futility.

“Beware the wicked wish,” he rumbled, dipping his tongue through her folds and slurping in a most vulgar fashion. “You belong to me. Your pleasure belongs to me. If you remain too proud to beg for mercy,  _ well _ .”

Zelda whined.

Gan laughed, taunting her again. This time he trailed his tongue through her folds and kissed her clit until she quivered again, and slid his hands up -  _ down? _ \- her body to cup her breasts as he nuzzled his whole face into her. He pulled away to smack his lips rudely and taunt her with something she couldn’t quite make sense of with her pulse rushing in her ears and lightning in her bones, except it had  _ something _ to do with tight, and throbbing, and ruin.

He seemed to think himself funny.

Zelda screamed every profanity she could remember when he teased her clit yet again.

He rumbled something - it might have been a word, or it might have been a beastly warning, and then his whole hot mouth consumed her. He pulled her up into his face, and the light-chains moved, drawing her legs over his shoulders, letting her stretch and reach, encouraging her to clamp her thighs tight around him as he  _ devoured _ her.

It was  _ much _ better than the library.

If she could only think, if she could only breathe, she  _ might _ be able to draw comparisons to the second tryst in his vast antique bed. She was reduced to shuddering and whimpering when he finally lowered her back onto the heap of pillows. She could barely hear him over her racing blood.

“Sa’streka -  _ I need you like this, _ ” he growled, wrapping his hands around her thighs, forcing her wide as he laid his heat upon her once more. Something deep and ticklish moved inside - but she had no time to scramble after any idea of what he was doing. The pressure at her gates pulsed forge-hot. He roared, tipping his head back, and the spiritlight blazed from his chest.

The dizzy agony of his inexorable thrust was  _ like _ falling from the sanctuary tower, and it was  _ like _ chocolate melting on the tongue, and it was  _ like _ the tight crest of a little orgasm seizing her core, and it was none of these things at all. He filled her so slowly she couldn’t begin to measure anything, but he moaned to the heavens with every breath. 

Zelda’s head spun as with far too much drink. She panted for air. She struggled against the light chains. She needed touch. Desperately. Absolutely. She needed his body against hers, she needed to wrap her arms around his waist, around his neck,  _ something _ .

Gan rolled his hips, and he moaned a prayer.

He thrust deeper.

Light poured from his right hand, from his chest, from his golden eyes.

His sharp cheeks glistened with shining rivulets, honey dripped from his lips, smeared over his chin, darkened his beard. 

He rolled his hips, stirring madness deeper than before. He throbbed inside her, thicker, fuller, heavier, hotter. He stretched her so wide she felt the pull all the way to her knees, all the way through her root, kindling heat and heaping ever more pressure into the cradle of her hips.

He moaned and started to draw back. For one slender lightning bolt moment her mind flooded with eigengrau and her breathless flesh shivered, and then he was sliding, he was slipping, he was praying to his gods as his heavy middle pulled toward her hungry gates.

“ _ If you stop right now I will fucking kill you _ ,” she howled, thrashing against the light chains.

He paused, panting.

She howled at him, raw and primal in a way she  _ never _ had before. She gasped for air and scrambled for words as he throbbed, and she throbbed, and curses fell from her tongue. “Don’t you fucking  _ dare _ , you tease, you wretch! Give it back - give me that  _ thing _ \- not like that. Not - no - stop that - that  _ nonsense _ \- mmnf not  _ stop _ do the - the other - the  _ thing _ . Give it-! Do it  _ right _ you witless -  _ oh!  _ **_That!_ ** **”**

Sparks and phosphene. 

Heat.

Tremors.

Raw scouring wind.

A twinge of pain stitching knee to hip directly to her left ear, then it was gone in a wash of eigengrau and resonant thunder.

She burned. 

She cried.

She fought the light chains with every breath. She needed to fill her hands, and her hands were empty. Lightning struck her core, again, again, banishing velvet dark for burning white gold. Flames roared under her skin.

Full. 

Hot. 

Raw. 

Ravaged.

Shattering in a thousand pieces before the mighty roar of her king in triumph.

Tug. 

Slick. 

Pulse. 

Sharp.

Cold.

Hollow. 

Breathless.

Abandoned.

Soft shocking warmth enveloping, tugging, loud. He moaned, and dragged his tongue through her folds again. Sharp and electric when he touched her aching clit. 

He whimpered, and thrust his tongue inside her. 

She howled, less in pleasure than in rage.  _ How dare you tease-! _

He moaned something as he retreated. He caught her thigh in his teeth and thrust his fingers inside her. Broad and stiff and stretching her gates, and  _ not enough. _

She whimpered and whined and thrashed vainly.  _ More - I need more-! _

He kissed her thigh - and gave her more. Somehow. Something. The pressure inside her shifted, and the storm shook her bones. Light and dark in dizzying flickering glory.

Low rumbling hums of pleasure and a deliriously slow tongue wandering over every part of her. Empty and full, drenched and parched. She tangled her fists in his hair, anchoring herself for barely a breath before she was tossed off the towers again to tumble into the dizzy abyss. Her throat hurt, but the lightning was moving through her flesh and the only word she could hold in her mind for long enough to have any hope of uttering it someday was  _ more _ .


	8. Salt and Spice

Zelda shivered. She wanted to roll over and burrow deeper into the heat beside her. She couldn’t make her limbs obey. 

His broad hands stroked over her skin, warm and a little rough on her raw nakedness. 

She whimpered.

He clicked his tongue and hushed her with a nonsense rumble like he was soothing a restive beast. 

“Cold,” she stammered, weak and raspy even to her own ears. Her cheeks burned for how _he_ must think of such frailty. How much less he would hear her counsel now.

“Fever does that,” he said softly, and in the rising stroke of his hands a heavy cloth settled over her skin. “You are _radiant_ , vo’jathelet.”

Zelda fought to remember what radiant meant. Fought even harder to piece together _vo’jathelet_ . His _something_. It was not a word she could connect to any text - and it felt like he sometimes said it… differently, somehow - but if she was wrong about other pronunciations she might simply not recognize it. Or else her mind was still a scrambled mess from the sex. Or both.

Her cheeks grew warm again, her ears pricked with greater heat. She wanted to pull the cover up and hide and also bury her face against his chest and hold him tightly.

Once her limbs decided to work, she may just do one of those things. 

“Um,” she managed to say. Her lips were dry, and her voice sounded so very raw. She felt too hot and too cold at the same time. “Don’t. Don’t recall begging mercy.”

“Pity. It was _delicious,_ ” he purred, licking his lips noisily.

Zelda turned her head to bury her face into her arm as a wave of embarrassment filled her. And yet. “Wh-what was delicious, oh my king? Forgive me. I was… distracted?”

“Nothing to forgive. It’s been _ages_ since I've had the pleasure of a woman flooding over my thorn and cumming on my face,” he murmured, caressing her back through the soft wool of whatever he’d summoned.

Zelda was silent a moment as his words worked their way through her thoughts. Which happened really much faster than was probably proper, but when had proper ever entered her personal life? Her face grew flush as a small smile tugged at her lips. She had heard of the possibility of a third kind of effusion from feminine flesh, but none of her handmaidens had experienced it either, so she’d dismissed it as myth and fantasy. 

“Still enchanted by Hyrule’s landscape, oh my king?” Zelda teased as she pressed her back into his hand more firmly. “Even with such sudden wet seasons?”

“Mnnrf. _Especially_ with the discovery of your bountiful rain, dear Princess.”

Zelda laughed. 

“My king means to make Hyrule out to be a soft, pliable land,” Zelda flexed her thighs experimentally to see if they’d respond to her now. She shifted a knee and tested her weight on her elbow to prop herself up and gaze upon his beautiful face. “Don’t you worry, oh my king. Even if you can get Hyrule to come for you, at some point - sooner rather than later if I have any say in the matter - _you_ will come for Hyrule. And won’t _that_ be an interesting experience.”

He raised a heavy brow. “My dear Princess. You’ve pulled _three_ from flesh and spirit already this afternoon. If you require another before the hourglass turns I _will_ have to step over to my rooms for provisions anon.”

“You are being dramatic,” Zelda grinned and shook her head. “What I mean to say, since poetry is a thing that gets lost in meanings, is that when I can use my arm without feeling like it’s going to fall off my body, I must see about utilizing this _mesvu cyrba_ myself. Drive _you_ out of your goddess’ blessed mind.”

“Hn. Such promises,” he purred.

Zelda’s elbow gave out, and she collapsed back to the bed.

He petted her shoulder like he was soothing a restive cat. He sighed. He shifted his long legs against the rumpled bed, propping his knee up. The stoic warlord was _fidgeting_.

“You think I’m not serious? Or perhaps you don’t think I’d follow through.” Zelda poked his side gently.

“I would never doubt your reckless Will and general mischief. Just an idle temptation,” he rumbled, twitching a hand dismissively.

“Oh? It would please me to hear of this idle temptation, oh my king,” she grinned and poked him again, which turned into running her hand over his chest. 

Gan drew a sharp breath at the caress. “Not if it interrupts this.”

He held the silence for several beats, his muscles tensing and spiritlight pulsing with his heartbeat. He shifted and fidgeted as she drew whorls and loops over the soft stormwool.

“There is a certain perversity to the design,” he rumbled at last, his golden eyes narrowed to slits. “A cruel joke of the gods. Divided from my people and my own youth by _centuries_ , and _this_ is where they wove sa’chalut areldi’v, in a time I should never have even seen, in a spirit content without it. Do not mistake me - sal’cyrba remain a delight - but the perverse draw persists.”

“I think I like your version of perverse.” Zelda pulled herself halfway onto his chest so she could look him upon his face. “No reason we can’t have both, beloved. Each as the mood suits us and time permits. I wish to know you so much better than I do, and yet you hold yourself apart. Even now. Even here.”

He sighed, his hands growing still.

“We don’t have to pretend to wear the mask of duty. Not here. And certainly not when fate has played a cruel trick on us both.”

“No. Duty and purpose remain as the north star,” he rumbled. He shifted her up, guiding her to drape her entire weight upon his body, and smoothed the soft wool probably-blanket over her again. “I speak of a desire more… personal… than anyone should ever have to understand. Nor is every thread of those days tied fast. This much, perhaps, may be safe. Sometimes. If my adventurous Princess will indulge me.”

Zelda sighed. She placed her hands on his broad chest and turned her head to listen to his heartbeat. She cupped her legs around his waist to press herself as close to his warm core as possible. 

“How could I say no?” she murmured against him. She curled her fingers lightly against his flesh through his stormwool shirt. “Maybe I can’t undo that which was done so long ago. Today will always live in the echoes of yesterday, and there is no changing that. But today is not yesterday.”

“So you often remind me, vo’jathelet,” he murmured, curling up to brush a faint kiss over the crown of her head. “You will laugh, but this particular intoxicant was - quite rare in my youth. You may perhaps guess k’cyrba of many kinds were - _hn_ \- plentiful. I have always enjoyed the physical arts, and the pleasures of creation. For me, the awakening of sexual desire was in several ways an unexpected delight in a new medium which blended both, so to speak. At least - at first.”

Zelda nuzzled her cheek against his chest before turning her face to watch his again.

“I can believe it,” she said as her hands continued at drawing whorls and loops and spirals against him. “Your duties seem like they allowed for considerable differences from my own. But no matter how much you may like cake, if you _must_ eat cake of the same kind with every meal regardless of if you wanted buttered toast instead, then a slice of rye with ghee is a gift of the goddesses. I’m sure you can imagine that a princess is not often touched, much less taken for a tumble. So maybe it’s not the same, but it feels good to be here like this.”

“Ah, the skin hunger. I am - intensely familiar,” he murmured, winding his arms around her. “But you speak of _ghee_? This is not Hylian cuisine.”

“What absolute nonsense. Maybe the _word_ has shifted since your day, but I assure you butter cucco is a highly regarded simple decadence of which I am immensely fond,” she huffed, prodding his side. “Is it not enough to eviscerate our histories and scoff at the efforts of our scholars to repair the wounds of ancient injustices and malicious censorship, but now you will tell me my ancestors kept a boring kitchen?”

“Hn. In a word - yes. You are familiar with the maps and wars of Windblade’s reign and those of her foremothers. Hyrule _could not_ trade widely or well, and though her better cooks endeavored to advance their art, foreign spices were rare, and foreign foods more so. I admit I haven’t looked for antique or foreign cookbooks in your library-”

“You wouldn’t need to. Carrot pudding and moon milk are _so_ common it’s a point of ridicule at court that I prefer them to artistic or fashionably _rational_ nouveau dishes. Anyways neither you nor my ancestor were generous enough to leave me any such treasure. I would dearly like to know how your people ate, and if we can recreate it now. You’ve been so generous in maintaining a Hylian menu for my sake-”

“I’ve done no such thing,” he interrupted with an odd stumbling hesitance in his tone. “Aside from ingredients my warriors have not been able to find, my _one_ concession to Hylian custom at my table lies in the crockery and flatware. I had been wondering whether your tolerance of Geld’o food was manners or stratagems.”

Zelda chewed her lip. “Well that’s an interesting thought. If we’ve been eating Geld’o style with as close as spice availability allows, and you call our now ancient dishes dull, then we shouldn’t waste time searching for a Geld’o cookbook. We’re looking for a Hylian one.”

“There _are_ other absent vegetable-“ he began.

“Or better,” Zelda tapped his chest, “you are a first hand witness. What was a typical lunch while you were in the castle?”

He sighed. “Most court feasts during winter summits were a parade of aesthetic nonsense and little sustenance. Toward the end of the season or - in less public affairs? A clear soup of onions and bone broth to awaken the appetite, followed by soft wheat bread with honey and butter.”

“ _Oh_ , that's a meal in itself with a slab of toasted cheese atop and a sodden slice of yesterday’s loaf at the bottom to catch all the savory,” she hummed. 

“As _peasants_ would eat it,” he countered. “At the royal table it was _only_ broth and onion, made with as little butter as necessary to glaze the onions, and a pinch of fresh field herbs floated atop when served. Fish usually followed, though I ate little of it and can have less opinion. Root vegetables of some preparation - usually sour or sweet - then those of the vine, prepared either savory or salted, depending on whether you were on speaking terms with Labrynna at the time. Then roast, followed by herbs, then stewed fowl with a toasted bread crumble. The final course might be stewed, honeyed fruit or pastries filled with honeyed farm cheese, or both.”

“Blessed light, how long did that kitchen parade _take?_ ”

He shrugged. “Three hours for a simple evening like that.”

Zelda swore. “And feast days?”

“You answered your own question,” he teased.

“ _Well_ ,” she huffed, snuggling down against him. “We _do_ still eat all those things - the glazed chickaloo carrots Blackscarf made two days ago are an especial favorite.”

“And would have _scandalized_ Windblade’s court, even without Sebastian’s little intolerance of nuts. Chickaloo are savory, as is butter. Sweet carrots would be chopped fine with apples and dried winter berries, baked with a little sweet wine and dressed with powdered honeyglass. Sour ones would be grated and soaked in herbed vinegar for a day - truly fermented vegetables and herbs were eaten by your more fortunate peasants, artisans, merchants, lower gentry and the like.”

“That sounds revolting. That is almost prisoner food.”

Gan laughed. 

“Please tell me they could at least cook _meat_ properly?”

He shrugged. “In itself the common preparation on the spit or in the clay is perfectly serviceable. There was always fresh butter on the table to amend a poor cut, though no servant dared present truly dry beef to a royal. Even to a dark foreign barbarian royal.”

“I suppose the challenge of cooking for hundreds without the advantages of modern ovens _would_ have some casualties, but even without proper accompaniment a good steak carved from a turned side of beef or venison, with that sharp, spicy, salt-crusted edge and oozing hot pink tender insides-”

“You speak of it like a slice of meat is a nearly erotic experience,” he teased. “They took a simpler approach, charring the surface with or without a bath of wine, and letting time over slow coals manage the rest. They did catch the drippings for other savory dishes, and a few sauces. It was a regular point of amusement among my council that I was becoming wealthy in defiance of tradition, selling Hyrule erisfruit and firebean dust from my personal storerooms.”

“I wish our cook was here. I don’t know the trick of preparing it myself. But when you eat her _perfect_ steak, you meet your maker for the briefest moment.” Zelda laughed and rubbed his chest.

“Hn,” he said, cradling her close.

“Somehow I would believe that you were probably charging an exorbitant amount, too. All while claiming that only the mightiest and strongest Geld’o have the courage to truly season their food,” Zelda grinned and licked her lips. “It is now something of a strange omission to ever have salt on meat or poultry or fruit that is _not_ mixed with citron and erisfruit save on doctor’s orders or bearing children. Our ancient food sounds exactly that, ancient. Archaic even.”

“Those outlanders who developed a taste for our spices poured silver rupee at my feet to acquire it,” he said with a wicked delight. “They never did. Other dishes, especially the savory and sweet - and gant’shakroth especially - but Saivaitha preferred mild or sour heat. There was a sauce we made with roasted erisfruit and King’s Honey and fig, excellent with meat or poultry of any kind - they could bear no more than coats the bowl of a spoon. It is passing strange that they would have ever… kept vestiges of our ways at all, but especially these little… trifles she had no care for even when we were friends.”

“Something must have changed after everything that happened with you,” Zelda frowned in contemplation. “The records of the era are much altered, rewritten, or outright destroyed.”

“An ancient Hylian tradition,” he scoffed.

“Those ridiculous treatises on the management of agricultural land and tenancy and the training of horses are some of the few things that I have reasonable certainty are original since the marginalia is such a _familiar_ hand. I’m sure if it had been discovered closer to her time, I wouldn’t even have had that much to learn more of you.” 

“It was something of a… little joke, I suppose. Except for hallowed scrolls of sacred poetry, it was our way to converse with the texts. Scandalous to them. Absolutely hated it. Couldn’t shake the idea that words being in a book made them changeless and precious - which was _precisely_ why Hylian history has ever been vulnerable to underhanded mistranslations and elisions and censorship and burnings. So of course when… I… attended their winter peace summits I spent many free hours in the Royal Library. They often threatened to have their charming Captain arrest me for vandalism.”

“ _Charming_ , huh. Did you get out of it by telling the Captain all the things you can do with the myriad tools at their disposal?” Zelda giggled and then thought about her Ganondorf in chains and a strip of leather in her hand. “Well that is an _inconvenient_ thought.”

Ganondorf laughed, full and warm. “I am sure the poor man would have perished at the suggestion. You, on the other hand… are dripping on my thigh again.”

“Can you blame me?” Zelda preened and lightly wrapped her teeth around the stormwool and a muscle underneath. “Just - a very intriguing thought. And also you did spill in me a few times. So it’s bound to happen.”

He drew a sharp breath. “True. Nor do I _mind_ the anointing, but that sort of … sal’cyrba would be… difficult. For me. It’s complicated. I can count on one hand the times I could… embrace kalu va’mesvut in any truth.”

Zelda studied him contemplatively.

“But you do like when you can,” her finger traced a gentle whorl around his chest and drew a circle around his heart. “I can appreciate that. Not only to trust someone that much, but to make yourself so vulnerable. And let me be clear, that’s definitely a good deal of the allure. And also - no. I shouldn’t be so crass. You don’t like it.”

“No - it’s merely unexpected. You are everything good and proper and light and blessed - and _I want you_ as I have wanted little else in this world or any other. One does not blaspheme before the shrine to which one’s spirit… anyway, I had prefer truth in all things. Our worlds and customs are different, that is all.”

“They are. And, truth be told, the way it makes your mind grind to a halt is _quite_ thrilling,” said Zelda with a mischievous grin. “I really do appreciate your regard, my king. And also, I don’t particularly _want_ to be a shrine, an untouchable idol on an impossible pedestal. Not with you. I can hardly consider myself proper when I want to put you in a collar and stroke your cheek with a leather strap and tell you to worship my ankle as you have worshipped my cunt, while in the same breath wanting to be plowed as fertile land for your conquering seed, _and also_ to lie here and just _be_ with you.”

Ganondorf _shivered_.


	9. Bringing Rain

Two breaths, deep and measured. Ganondorf splayed his hand across her back. The blanket vanished. With a grunt of effort he rolled aside, carrying her with him, laying her on the bed in his shadow once more. Something clicked beside her, and damp coolness rolled against her hip.

“Zelda,” he began, low and warm. 

As he so often did just before he left her side.

“Don’t,” she said, reaching for him. 

He sighed. He bowed his head a little and his golden eyes slid shut even as the spiritlight pulsed bright blossoms through stormwool. The dark blanket reappeared to drape her from shoulder to toe as he slid his hand out from under her back. “You’re right. How could the ways of the spirit, of vanished and forgotten foreign ancestors be at all comprehensible to anyone of this age? When victory is secured, perhaps we will have time to at least… speak… of modern Hylian customs.”

Zelda peered up at his shadowed face, studying his closed expression. He drew close to something sacred to him, the hesitance in his usually elegant and measured words hinting once again at a hidden passion rare as drops of light spoken of in legend.

“If,” she murmured. “If fortune has the courage to let us survive past that point. You are trying to avoid the topic entirely, and doing so poorly, my king. I am not trying to force the matter, mind you. But at least have the decency to tell me you need time to process… well, everything of this evening, before you leave.”

“There is no  _ if _ . I  _ will _ win,” he says sternly, his eyes too bright. “Nor do I  _ avoid _ anything of your curious collection. I am now sufficiently rested for whatever flavor you desire in the next course of your feast, Princess.”

“Anything?” Zelda asked, licking her lips. “Anything at all?”

“Hn,” he said, a wry curl tugging at one corner of his wide lips. 

“In that case, do be so good as to roll onto your back,” she purred. “I have been missing a particular thing.”

One brow rose, and he rolled his lower lip between his teeth meditatively. He drew a measured breath.

Ganondorf pulled away, shifting askew on the bed, stretching out supine as she asked. She had always thought the dimensions of the royal beds somewhat cold and excessively grand, and the antique preserved in the north wing merely an exaggeration of the same. This ancient king  _ filled _ hers, even at the longest angle and a foot still resting on the floor. 

He said nothing, but his golden eyes could not seem to settle their focus. For the moment his body was still - his mind assuredly was  _ not _ .

Zelda’s hands wandered onto his hips as she pulled herself upright and propped an elbow up to look into his eyes in thought. 

“Truth in all things, you said.” Zelda chewed her lip. “There was a little  _ click _ sound a few moments ago, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen your eyes do that glowing thing. Is there something I should know before continuing?”

“Mmn? The glow is… similar to the other. But the  _ tik _ you speak of,” he rumbled, gesturing in a rolling, beckoning motion. Something in his fist clicked, and his eyes creased in amusement as he rolled something against something else. He teased with recreating that hidden noise until she seized his wrist - and with an infuriatingly smug little  _ hn _ , he opened his fist to reveal smooth tumbled diamonds with a few wispy threads of translucent white and pink frozen inside their clarity.

They all glistened with damp.

Zelda blushed and picked one up. She held it between them so they could both see it.

“Oh my king, is  _ this _ that delicious weight I couldn’t solve earlier?” Zelda purred, offering it to his lips. Her face felt hot as her pulse quickened and her core clenched in even the thought of his lips brushing the diamond lightly. “Tell me, oh my king, do you want to taste the deepest of my hunger?”

“Indeed,” he rumbled, licking the precious stone in her fingers with provocative flair. He teased kisses over her fingertips once he’d cleaned the diamond of her creamy arousal. “Come, bring your oasis to my tongue and quench my thirst woman.”

“Hn. Maybe I will.” Zelda threw a leg over his thigh and pulled herself on top of his hips. She inched her way up his torso with a rolling to her hips that suggested she were riding his thorn raised in glory. She dug her fingers into stormwool and flesh beneath. She shifted the cloth as high as possible with it still trapped under his back and settled with her heat over his navel. Light bloomed under her and pulsed through the soft woolen shirt.

“And what makes you think you’ve earned being my throne, my pet? Perhaps you should ask a little nicer or you may just find yourself with no drink at all.” Zelda grinned, sitting upright and playing with the diamond in one hand and watching how it caught the light. She slid her other hand up his shirt and wrapped her fingers around his nipple. She tugged playfully,  _ quite  _ aware of how much of a view he would have.

“ _ Hnn _ ,” he said, casting away the other diamonds into a distressingly  _ substantial _ pile of diamonds and rubies and amber and topaz heaped in a vast damp shadow spoiling the whole middle of the bed. Edges of it vanished under his hip and middle. Another, smaller heap of gems winked from beside a battered, sodden pillow shoved aside in the aftermath of the last dance. 

Ganondorf wrapped his hands over the meat of her thighs, his eyes roving over her mostly-naked flesh. A shiver rolled through the heat and bulk of him below her, light pulsing along the jagged scar at his centerline. When he spoke, he used that most troublesome deep purr that  _ always _ plucked a resonant string at her core and made it hard to think of anything else. “ _ Come _ to me, vo’dyate rajela. Open your garden over my parched lips and drown me in honeywine once more.”

Zelda shivered and bit her lip and ground her hot, sodden core against him. 

“It is unreasonably unfair that your voice does that  _ thing. _ ” Zelda breathed the last out as she accentuated her point by tightening her legs and grinding her sex along him until his shirt grew rough with wetness and her thighs strained to accommodate his wide chest. Even so, she pressed her legs against him to inch up until her folds were directly atop his heart. 

He groaned and licked his lips, kneading her thighs, eyes lingering on her swollen vulva.

“Tell me, my king, my pet, tell me that you would drown in bliss offering such sweet benediction from your skilled tongue.”

“ _ Sa’streka _ , I burn for you,” he groaned, sliding his hands higher, rolling his thumbs deeply against aching muscles, dragging her mind back to visceral impressions of her cunt being stretched wide for him, around him, opening deeper than she'd ever imagined. He breathed deep, raised his eyes to her face, and purred again. “Take your throne, o vo’rajela, eclipse the sun with paradise, let the heavens flood in your shadow. Let me kiss your glory and the last drum of my heart will dance life into the holy earth.”

Zelda moaned as her body clenched in want of his offered attentions. She drew her hips further up his body until her core was just above his throat, and just out of reach of his skilled lips. She idly tossed the diamond onto the loose pile of other gems still slick from their journey within her so she could draw her nails through Ganondorf’s hair. 

“I am  _ almost _ convinced of your sincerity, my pet,” Zelda flexed her deep core muscles, feeling her root tighten and remind her that it desperately needed  _ his  _ attentions immediately. She asked peace for a moment longer as her heart began thundering in her ears. “But first, only a scent. Surely a man of such exquisite words must enjoy the aroma before tasting the wine.”

He growled deep in his throat and lowered his chin, hauling at her hips to drag her closer. “Wicked temptress, as if I have not been drunk on your perfume for hours! Enough of coquetry and art - bring me that tender Hylian blossom  _ now. _ ”

Zelda grinned wolfishly and used her grip on his hair to pull herself unto his lips. Her nails flexed against his scalp as she looked down at his half-covered face and she settled her lustful pearl against his nose.

His breath was hot as it flowed through her folds, making her shiver in delight. 

“Such  _ need _ cannot be refused,” she murmured, cheeks burning.

His wide tongue slid along her silken gates as his hands wrapped around her hips and drew long lines up her back. She gasped as she felt him draw a wide spiral in towards her center - and then she groaned as he cupped his tongue around her hooded gem.

An electric tingle coursed down her spine as he traced one nail traced down the length, and she thought she heard his wicked chuckle as he kneaded her ass in a hunger equal to her own. Zelda bit her lip as she watched his eyes crinkle as his tongue collected the honey from her core and then sought further.

A firm tug of her braid made her squeak and suddenly she saw only the bed canopy as his other hand coiled her braid in his fist, tethering her to her delicious perch. Her cunt felt engulfed in his mouth as she arched her hips to try to keep balance even as she wanted to melt even further into his divine lips. A slow pulsing pressure made her cry out as her depths made her quite aware of how much she  _ wanted _ his steady hand moving her.

He moved slow and deep against her flesh, and he held her tightly. He nuzzled her clit but rarely, focused on adoring every other part, humming in approval sometimes. His free hand wandered over her ass, caressing and claiming however his whim drove him - but with every circuit his touch seemed to drift lower.

Zelda whined with need. She’d always wanted attention fore and aft, but there was never an opportunity to indulge with another body. She endeavored to rise with his falling hand and was very aware of the pressure of his nose parting the apex of her folds when he nuzzled deep to thrust his tongue inside her. That  _ feeling _ of being taut as a bowstring overcame her. She didn’t want just a general experience of being fully indulged like her fantasies so often wondered about, but to be indulged by  _ him _ , with all his skill and intensity and strength.

“Oh, you glorious  _ tease _ ,” she mewed.

His muffled hum of amusement trembled her sex. He wriggled his tongue through her folds as his free hand followed her silent wish. His fingers seemed to be dripping, hot and silky, and every drop that rolled down the cleft tickled until his touch caught up to soothe it. His deep purr trembled her again when he finally,  _ finally _ laid gentle pressure against her throbbing rose.

Zelda’s fingers tightened against his scalp as she pressed back ever so slightly against his touch. Her eyes closed as she focused on his lips and hands and the ghost of fullness that wanted to be real again. Another moan escaped her as she rolled her hips forward again, caught between two pleasures that wanted equal satisfaction.

His dripping hand followed her motion, delving through the first gate of the rose with steady grace. A tease still, but it was something, it was more, it was a promise of still more to come. A light little tickle of something slid between rose and gates, and her cunt clenched  _ hard _ . His muffled hum left no doubt of his approval, and the creak of the bed suggested he too rocked his hips in rising appetite. He tugged her braid harder, he suckled her ardently, and his tight breath stirring her curls grew fast and heavy.

Zelda’s hips rolled in time to his breaths. She ached for more of his tongue, more of his fingers, more his strong tugs on her hair, more of  _ everything _ he had. Her skin felt hot and cold and tight and an interesting electric twinge made her eartips feel aflame.

“Ohh,  _ yes _ , my pet,” she growled and panted as she pulled at his hair to draw his lips further onto her sex. “Let me  _ feel _ your thirst.”

He groaned as she wound her fists in his hair, and he answered faithfully, giving benedictions and giving of his heat and strength and skill, deeper, broader, wetter. The more he gave, the less sense she could make of what he was doing to her. She had never known such abandon with temple devotees - even when her rare escapes to the temple brought her  _ wonderfully _ devoted souls, skilled in their pleasurable prayers, a part of her always worried if she pulled or bucked too hard she would hurt them, that resting her weight against their bodies would smother them, that if she let herself revel too deeply that the limits of flesh would ruin everything forever. She fretted any slip, any frayed edges in her masked grace would shatter the mystery for them, that she would be stripped and revealed as nothing but a lonely bundle of fallible mortal flesh, her dignity and reputation burned to ash for succumbing to a painfully mortal hunger. She fretted that they offered those intensely physical devotions to the unseen only from a sense of moral obligation or hope of return. 

Ganondorf’s deep kisses stole all such cares from her heart. He was enormous. He was strong. He was  _ magical _ . The burning wind against her mound assured her of his endurance. His deep rumbling and firm grasp assured her beyond all doubt of his enjoyment. His tongue, his fingers, his voice commanded her to drink deeply of lust - and drink she did.

Time fell away. Thought fell away. Maple beams creaked beneath the mattress, vulgar wet noises pricked her ears, tautness and ineffable presence consumed her root. He gave, and he gave, and his strange antique poetry became truth in her trembling flesh.

She wanted more.

However much her king gave, drinking of his offerings was saltwater on her tongue. He released her braid at some point, his hands engulfing the lowest curve of her ass and encouraging her to fuck onto his tongue.

And still she craved more, the trembling promise of dizzy bliss just beyond her grasp, but closer, closer…

Zelda’s hands moved to his temples, to the loosened, sweaty locks framing his strong features. She curled forward to watch his face as he drank of her, his fingers soothing an emptiness in her rose that her lotus couldn’t quite touch - after all, they lacked the unique serendipities of flesh within her. 

Her eyes caught his. Her hunger fed upon his. Her core felt alive and electric and something about his  _ eyes _ drove her crazy. She arched into his lips, losing focus of everything but his intense eyes and sang as she bucked against his face, holding on tight so she couldn’t miss a moment of seeing him.

Not that this strategy worked  _ particularly _ well - the gleaming gold slashes of his eyes narrowed still further and he did  _ something _ , as if he knew, as if her hunger to see him under her told him some great and terrible secret. Pressure shifted at her core and the world fell to eigengrau and she tumbled breathless and shuddering from the precipice  _ again _ .

It wasn’t  _ fair _ .


	10. Blade and Bond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small early post as a bonus, Because Reasons.

Zelda gasped for wind, embarrassed to be trembling as she struggled to regain her balance on his chest. Ganondorf tormented her mercilessly, withdrawing his fingers too slowly. He panted breathlessly, his whole beard dark and dripping wet. 

It was  _ mortifying _ to behold the aftermath of her own madness.

What his golden eyes lacked in focus they made up in light. His spirit thrummed with vibrant power, his pulse raced as much as her own.

And yet, even licking his broad lips, his coiffure wrecked and his face drenched, he somehow remained smug and aloof and untouchable.

“ _ Curious education, hmm? _ ” Zelda rasped, frustrated.

“Hn. And here I’d began to suspect my Princess  _ liked _ a little  _ golden tongue _ spicing her amusements,” he countered with a wicked, lopsided grin. His voice seemed a bit rough, and he stumbled over her title. It was probably just from his efforts to regain mastery of his breath.

Probably.

Maybe.

“Fffuck you,” she panted, though the intended effect of her censure was more than a little spoiled when she squealed and writhed at the wicked twist of his retreating fingers.

“Sa’ikhusa  _ yes _ ,” he rumbled, his body tensing under her. His hands left her empty and shivering. His lip pulled ever so slightly between his teeth was  _ not enough _ . The secrets behind his golden eyes remained inscrutable under the stoic strength and skill that made him so completely  _ king _ .

His damp stormwool shirt seemed ever rougher under her thighs, and her torn, sweaty chemise clung to her in awkward, annoying folds. She fumbled with the counterweight ornament tangled in her hair. It was supposed to rest just above the nape of her neck, but he’d wrecked that hours ago. 

She still held at least one secret he did not.

Though her fingers trembled with exhaustion and the aftermath of pleasure, she popped the hidden catch and drew from the platinum counterweight of her circlet a blade no longer than her fingers but sharp as the north wind. She gathered the ragged chemise in her other fist. 

His eyes snapped into focus, tracking to the steel in her hand the  _ moment _ she brought it out. He flinched back - but there was no room for him to retreat in any truth, pinned to the mattress under her wanton flesh. 

She tugged the ragged mistlinen taut with a curse and sliced the rest of the way through the ruined garment. 

He said nothing. His right palm pressed flat against the bed beside them, hard, braced to rise, to shove, to use the power thrumming in the mark he bore which so closely mirrored her own. His attention remained riveted on the tiny blade and  _ only _ on the blade as she stripped the chemise from her shoulders and threw it on the floor.

He was afraid.

Everything they’d done together, every argument weathered, every comfort shared, and he still assumed she intended harm for the slightest breath of imagined evidence. He still feared betrayal and pain when he looked at her.

And yet.

He hesitated. 

He could have summoned his magic. He could have used the strength he held ready. He could have done a hundred different things - but instead he lay taut and frozen. Waiting. Watching.

Zelda wound her free hand in his soft knit shirt. “ _ You _ \- I have had  _ enough _ of your - your stubborn pride.”

Ganondorf swallowed sharply. 

His pulse flew, raising the vein on the side of his neck where sweat and sex wove shining lacework over his dark olivestone skin. 

“Beg,” she suggested, tipping the blade just a little, just to make the lowering hearthlight flash. Just to make him confront the visceral reality of a circumstance that for once revealed a deep current of feeling in him. 

“I will not,” he murmured softly, golden eyes riveted to the steel, his swift breaths grown shallow.

Zelda slashed down between her sodden thighs and through bunched black wool, swift and sure. The yarns snapped and the rent tore wide at once. Spiritlight burned through the gash.

Ganondorf’s sharp golden eyes flared wide with shock. His lips parted, a  _ little _ , but he said nothing.

Zelda gathered more wool from the embroidered collar to the swiftly raveling edge of the new cut. She tugged it sharp and sudden, and just as swift she tucked the little blade under the cloth and severed it. He lay pinned and exposed beneath her to the same measure he’d made  _ her _ before he would let her have his touch in earnest. 

The jagged shining scar rose just past the fourth rib, left of center. She imagined she could see the faint distortion of cracked bones in the blue-white light. The pulsing brilliance shifting the tone and color and clarity matched the hammering of his heart, the suddenly anxious stumble of her own. It was hard to look directly upon it. She resisted the temptation to look away. 

“ _ Zelda _ ,” he whispered.

“Hn. That’s a much better look,” Zelda said lightly as she tucked the little blade back into its disguised sheath. She drew her finger down his chest where the cut fabric framed him. She drew her hand up the edge of the pulsing scar and finally let it come to rest over his heart. Touching the bright scar directly felt like touching the cut flesh of a sunwarmed voltfruit. Whatever made it changed him somehow, and healing formed no part of its consequence.

Ganondorf gathered the rumpled bedclothes in one fist, slowly, like his mind was mired in honey. His confusion gave her time to arrange the ravaged shirt into a fetching V and trace the edges of the bright scar more than once. He watched her, and said nothing.

Zelda grinned wolfishly at him. “I am still down one garment to your two. Given the other was a dress…  _ well _ . It is wise that you have already removed your pants. Turnabout is fair play.”

“I,” he began, rough and rasping. He swallowed sharply and something about his eyes hardened - but there was a brittleness in his growl. “I have not so many garments that I am like to forgive this insult Princess.”

“No?  _ You _ have so few?” With her left hand she gently pinched his nipple. His breath did  _ not _ hiss in the shocked pleasure she enjoyed so much, not this time. His golden eyes darted in anxious randomness. “I’m sure my king can commission more. After all,  _ clearly _ clothing is replaceable.”

“ _ Woman _ ,” he growled.

“Or does my pet believe  _ my _ wardrobe to be infinite? Does he imagine he did not see the same dress day after day until its ruin? Did my pet consider the vast amount of fabric and judge it as an acceptable loss? Did my pet consider that most things a crown princess wears in this age require two attendants to put on?”

“You embrace injustice to thus condemn a sleeping man,” he growled. “Go on your wings of light to the northern state rooms and open the golden chest if you cannot school yourself to patience.”

“Mmmmmmno. I rather enjoy the feast laid out before me,” Zelda purred as she placed both hands on his chest and let them wander, exploring the ridges and contours and teasing the ruined garment aside to reveal even more. She considered baiting the scholar to see if it tempered his mood. “One does not accidentally rip asunder a thing in their sleep if they did not wish to do so when awake. Your  _ hunger _ betrays you, vo’jathelet, and I  _ will _ enjoy every moment this.”

“No - you…. if  _ you _ speak of a… favorite… it is va’jathel  _ eth _ ,” he rasped, to all appearances unaware of bait or hook. He pushed against the mattress but managed to retreat no more than a few inches closer to the carved headboard and heavy corner post. 

“Hmmm. I have an interesting device that would make the word  _ explicitly _ correct, va’ja _ chele _ th. Yes?” Zelda’s hands spread up over his broad torso and out to his shoulders. She grinned down at him when he startled at the shift in the word. He did not expect her to have caught the nuance. He did not want her to know the more intimate form of the word. She kneaded his biceps with her fingertips. “But I have other plans first.”

“ _ Other _ ,” he rumbled thinly, every muscle still rigid. His closed expression betrayed only his fierce determination to hide his thoughts.

“Yes, va’ja _ chele _ th.  _ Other _ ,” Zelda’s hands wandered further along his arms and rested lightly at his elbows as she wriggled her seat lower, wrapping her thighs tight about his waist. “We’ll strip that smug intoxicating grin and make you  _ howl _ for me. Just like I did for you. I’ll learn all of those delicious ticks and whimpers you hide away from me.”

“A dangerous game for even an adventurous princess,” he rumbled low, flexing his hands into the mattress again. His pulse thrummed hot and fast, and light poured from the terrible scar. The black stormwool unraveled more with every movement, shredding under his tension and her teases.

“ _Queen_ , my dear pet,” Zelda’s hands slid down his forearm until she held his wrists in lightly in her fingers. She pulled them gently at first, testing to see his reaction. “If you cannot bear your most adventurous  _ queen _ , then beg for the game to end.”

He pulled his teeth between his lips. His golden eyes darted over her face, anxious, seeking, guarded. He flexed and tightened his broad hands. At the second tug though, he allowed her to move his wrists. In no way could it be said he relaxed his countenance or his body, but he followed her movement - slowly, hesitantly, apprehensively. He did not fight her, but he did not embrace the game eagerly either. Not yet. He was afraid, but his rough voice remained defiant: “I will not.”

His halting confession echoed in her memory:  _ that sort of sal’cyrba would be difficult for me. I can count on one hand the times I could embrace kalu va’mesvut in any truth. _

_ Kalu va’mesvut _ \- a bedgame which  _ might _ translate something like  _ flower, her mask _ , but that made little sense. He used kalu almost like a name, almost but not quite a title. She would have expected  _ mesvut va’chalut _ for an act of flowering  _ from _ a mask, or a mask which flowered. The nuance of his language and the murkiness of no articles made translation difficult - what was once a charming puzzle for passing idle hours or unwinding from a long and tedious council session became far more urgent with the ancient king in her bed.

The  _ va _ must be important somehow or he should have said  _ ka’mesvu _ instead. Either  _ kalu _ or  _ mesvu  _ carried a deeper implication - whether alone or in context. 

And it terrified him.

Yet.

He followed her wish.


	11. Shadow and Echo

“It would displease me if va’jacheleth pushed his needs aside without even a word,” Zelda murmured as she guided his hands higher still, flexing her legs around his waist. Her heart beat in her ears as the need to not misstep grew - and yet she wanted -  _ needed  _ \- to bring him the pleasures he brought her. The idea of him squirming in chains was  _ also _ quite appealing. “You wouldn’t want to displease me, would you, my pet?”

“ _ Ne, vo’rajela, _ ” he whispered, licking his lips. Nervous, taut, retreating into his mother tongue. He allowed her to push his hands above his shoulders, but where her pressure drifted out a bit on the left, he pulled against it. Not down, but in. His jaw tightened, and he swallowed hard. He seemed to force the panting plea past his teeth: “ _ Ne _ \- not like that - I - not there.”

Zelda immediately moved with him and drew both of his hands closer to his center in a smooth and gentle arc.

“Alright. Not like that,” Zelda nodded and let go his left hand so she could stroke his face. She bit her lip in worry as her fingers lingered on his cheek. “Does my pet need a moment, or beg for the game to end?”

He flexed his left hand, pulling his arm still closer to center - but though free, he did not lower it. The position must bother him more than the restriction of movement. His golden eyes narrowed. His breath remained shallow and quick. His cheeks were still damp from the sex, but the beads of moisture gathering on his brow seemed more like sweat. Many heartbeats drummed past them before he spoke again, low as before, on the edge of whispering. “I do not beg.”

“It was a rare treat to encounter a devotee of love who could truly unwind their knightly training to allow the pleasure of  _ exploring _ the full potential of what you seem to call  _ va’mesvut _ , you know. I understand men accustomed to control sometimes sought to lay their burdens aside on holy ground, but knights who lived much of their lives in peril for others’ sake could rarely endure silken cords without their sight, or full darkness without free movement, or to grovel in humble service without some surety of lavish reward.”

He grunted vague assent, studying her face. “War is hell.”

Zelda hummed in thought and bowed low to kiss his proud and salty brow. She whispered onto his skin: “I will not think any less of your strength if you say the word.”

“ _ Ne _ ,” he murmured.

“I do crave your heartstrings for my harp, your true song filling my ears, but if  _ mesvu _ is too much-” she began.

“Just - not like that, not yet. The chains - platinum - warded - they were - the anchors were… set wide,” he cut in, rough and stumbling over the confession. He flinched away from it, closing his eyes and lowering his voice still further. “If you came to harm in my - it would - the risk is too great.” 

Zelda kissed his brow again, letting her lips linger and wander slowly to collect all the sweet salt until she finally settled on his lips. His kiss in return was unusually hesitant. As she broke the kiss, she stroked his face gently.

“Then I will never bind you like that without your request, va’jacheleth,” Zelda said softly. She slowly sat back upright and gently guided his right hand up towards the headboard. “Is this safer, my pet?” 

He exhaled slowly. He brushed his fingers over the carved ironwood, then wrapped his hand around a curved notch by the corner post, just above his head. His eyes opened to narrow slits. “Vo’rajela - I - I warn you but once. Whatever torment you weave, _ I will not yield _ \- and I  _ will _ remember.”

“Such strong resolve. It will be a pleasure to test it,” Zelda eyes crinkled in delight as she grabbed his other hand and guided it to rest by the first. “Now don’t let go. A good pet needs silks and bindings to stay put. Any  _ average _ devotee can be bound - don’t get me wrong, black leather frames a body nicely - but you are the  _ best _ pet. You don’t  _ need _ such trivial things, do you?”

“Hn,” he said, lip curling in the slender beginnings of a wry grin. He grasped the carved ironwood above his head with both hands. “There is a proverb about  _ wishes _ , rajela’v. Who now remains free to save you from your own folly?”

“Tsh - does my darling pet forget already how  _ well _ fertile lands embrace fresh seed?” Zelda asked with an air of innocence. She wriggled her hips lower, and as she sat upright to straddle his waist she drew her nails down the exposed V of flesh. She grasped the stormwool and yanked the cloth to unravel it further, but the soft knit wool did not offer the satisfying snap and rip of linen. Her only reward for the destruction was a crumpled tangle of loose yarns and a little more olivestone flesh exposed to her whim - and his smug little  _ hn _ as he watched her do it. 

She dug her nails into his chest and bowed to set her teeth on a tender nipple.  _ That _ bought her a sharp, startled cry and a reflexive arching of his back. He panted roughly when she licked and suckled, he groaned for nips and pinches and nails pressing dimpled crescents into his skin. 

“Never,” he gasped when she relented just enough to shift to his other side. “ _ Never _ will I forget the pleasure of taking you.”

“Mmm good answer,” Zelda purred and began a slow, broad lick from the ridge of muscle up and over his nipple and ending at his neck. “And surely my good pet  _ also _ remembers his  _ folly _ as I return it to him. Would  _ you _ have wanted to be saved from weaving it?”

She gave him no chance to respond before sinking her teeth into his soft neck and suckling his sweet and sweaty flesh.

Ganondorf cried out and arched under her, hips rising from the bed. He formed no words, but his body spoke for him of mingled shock and pleasure and fear and arousal. He tipped his chin back as she feasted upon him, exposing more of his scarred throat. His grip on the headboard remained strong.

Zelda released him with a low groan. “Oh, that  _ was _ delightful.” 

“ _ Hnnn _ ,” he groaned.

She pressed her nose against his neck and inhaled deeply as she flexed her hips. His waist felt damp, and she smiled wickedly. “Oh, look what you made me do. Already soaking you again. You squirm  _ deliciously _ well, my pet.”

“Wicked creature,” he groaned, a pulse of tension rolling through his body. “I  _ will not _ yield to your cruel torments!”

“Good,” Zelda breathed against his neck. She raked her nails up his flesh and drew soft whorls around his nipple as she nipped at the other side of his neck. “A devotee can be  _ fun _ , but I could never do  _ this _ and remain a revered priestess and nevermind respected ruler.”

She caught his nipple in thumb and forefinger and pinched hard as she bit into his neck deeper than before. She tried to growl, and was vaguely disappointed it came out as a low hiss.

His resonant moan made up for it. “Rajela’v,  _ rajela _ \- your  _ teeth - _ oh - whence this hunger?”

Zelda released his neck and gave it a small kiss and nuzzle as she soothed his abused nipple with wide circles using the palm of her hand. She stretched the truth just a little, feeding the mask, murmuring in his ear to savor the shiver which answered her. “I have long enjoyed playing with patterns of power and artifice. I have let you keep your quaint little shield of believing the twilight responsible for my appetite - until now. I am a woman of  _ intense _ hunger and you, my pet, are a  _ banquet _ .”

“ _ Zelda _ ,” he panted, clenching his hands on the headboard.

“Mm. Not tempted to challenge your bonds already, are you? No? Good pet.” Zelda pushed herself upright and let her hands wander over his broad chest. She shifted her seat lower still, settling clear of the ravaged woolen shirt at last. She licked her thumbs and teased his nipples with the illusion of suckling as he had done to her. 

He did not cry out, and he did not beg - not yet - but he panted open-mouthed and his breath stumbled for her tease. His eyes drifted over her nakedness.

“My hunger, my pet, is all consuming for you.” Zelda tightened her thighs around his hips and ground her soaked curls against his skin to accentuate her point. She dragged her hands down his chest, kneading and caressing, alternating nails and fingertips and palms, seeking the hidden levers and switches under his skin which would make him sing for her.

He seemed to resist. She was almost certain she  _ should _ be low enough to feel if his cock stirred. She didn’t want to turn just yet to see. She would prefer to think she misjudged his height and angle, than to look and find him distressingly soft and disinterested.

She caressed his sides and bowed to kiss his chest beside the scar. “I admit - at first I did not even think to sate my appetites with you. The twilight and the war and everything - dreadfully pressing stuff. I would as soon have lusted for one of my generals. We are forever grateful for your  _ convenient _ slumber in the library.”

“Rather you should be grateful you did not find yourself pulled into my first dream of you,” he grumbled, wriggling his hips deeper into the mattress.

“Hmmm perhaps  _ not _ ,” she countered, pressing another kiss to his skin, and another. She considered kissing the scar, but she could not be certain brushing against it did not hurt him. He was far too stoic. “When I first thought of you as  _ my _ king, I realized I wanted so much more of you. I began to hope your tastes were... like mine.”

“You have no idea,” he murmured.

“Then  _ tell me _ , my pet,” she returned, tightening her thighs about his hips. She tugged at the stormwool, but it would unravel no further. “When did you first think of bedding me, hm? When did you begin to imagine burying your thorn in a Hylian cunt and pumping a tender flower full of milk and honey and fertile Geld’o seed, hm?”

He allowed a brief and breathy laugh, his golden eyes thinning to slits. “ _ That _ fancy belongs to ancient days, long before your mother’s mother’s mother felt the first stirrings of moontides. The dream began to speak in the golden cadence of  _ your _ voice by the third day.”

“When the maps grew too big for the table…?”

“Hn,” he said, licking his lips. “You argued about the relevance of the Typhlo river. Refused to accept the Zora withdrawal seven years ago as evidence of Zant’s hand.”

“You grabbed my wrist when I would have walked away from your stubborn adherence to a vaporous theory,” she mused, stretching her mind back to a moment she barely even registered. He’d growled and glared, and eventually called her naive, dropping her wrist and insulting her education in basic principles of irrigation. “So that’s why you fell quiet and stormed away to read on your own.”

“If you can call it reading,” he said, flexing his hands. “I was somewhat distracted by the temptation to shake sense into you having turned into the impression of pushing you down on those maps. How your petticoats would hike up to your knee and that heavy cloak would fall aside…”

Zelda laughed, crawling her hands up to his shoulders, stretching over him to tease his lips with her own. “Is that all? A modest little peek under my skirts?”

His cheeks darkened, and his eyes slid away to the left. “Mmnnot for long. You begging for mercy, forgiveness, offering me anything, everything that I might spare your country, your life. You would be too proud to offer your maidenhood, and when I demanded it, you would bargain your tongue. And I would take it. And you would bargain your soft breasts, and I would feast, and then I would rut between and into your lips. And then you would whisper anxiously that I was still hard, and I would say… I enjoyed your willing tribute but… I am tired of waiting for your surrender.”

“And then?” Zelda purred for him, nuzzling his cheek. “How would you ravage me next?”

He swallowed sharply. “It varied, from night to night.”

“Tell me the first one,” she murmured, kissing the corner of his lip. When he didn’t answer, she teased with her tongue. Still, he said nothing. She pressed a line of slow and tender kisses across his soft lips and back to center,  _ eventually _ luring him into kissing back. She pulled away and blew a little stream of cold air over his wet lips, making him huff in mild offense. “Confess, my pet, how did you imagine the first time?”

He shook his head no, eyes closing. “It was not good.”

Zelda sighed, and draped herself on his chest, tucking her face against his neck. It felt good and right to lay there. “Tell me the first time your dream  _ remained _ pleasant to the end?”

“Hn. I cannot, because they  _ do _ end,” he rumbled, teasing. “The library tables however do remain something of a... recurring theme. Laying you out upon the maps and notes and parting your soft thighs. Taking your undergarments by force or magic and finding you dripping already, lusting without knowing why or what to do with it. You laugh, but I once thought you would be surprised by pleasure from my thumb parting you, that you would be discovering the mysteries in my hands, that chastity and pride would become pleasure, would become curiosity, would become wonder. I always imagined you would fear my size at first. Most people did. But I... dreamed that when I opened you,  _ your _ cry would be one of pleasure. That _ I  _ could offer you the answer to the mysterious formless whispers of your flesh, and… that even when milk flooded from every oasis you… would desire still more.”

“Mmmmmmunf and do I. It would be  _ interesting _ to explore this little dalliance of yours,” Zelda pushed herself upright and reached up to pull her braid forward and pretended to fan herself with it. “I shall do my best to play the soft maiden, though it has been a long time since that’s been true.”

“Hn,” he said, sardonic as ever. 

She giggled and leaned back to brush the edge of where his heavy crown should lay against his thigh, if he was in truth as ready as he claimed. He  _ did _ rise for her, though less dramatically than before. “Such a  _ big _ thorn - oh this poor innocent maiden could never!”

He  _ laughed _ . 

She drew a teasing whorl over his half-veiled crown.

“I misdoubt a thousand hours of practice would be enough to believe  _ that _ word from this wicked kalu va’mesvut,” he rumbled, eyes crinkling are the corners in the way that begged for kisses.

Zelda sat forward, folding her hands on his stomach, just below the lateral scar. “I just realized. That is  _ also _ something absent from the temple of love, and thinking of it now? It seems like - heresy or something..”

“Mm?”

“Laughter,” she said softly. “No one ever  _ laughs _ during the mysteries. It’s all solemn and elegant and beautiful and sexy, but no one ever makes a terrible joke or snickers over something awkward.”

“Mmn. Good.”

Zelda cried out in dismay.

He grinned wider. “It is good to know the intimate mysteries of faithful lovers remain sacred. No festival or performance or idle dalliance should be allowed to profane that which belongs to sal’cyrba. Now. Kiss me, woman.”

Soft and sweet became persuasive and ardent. Somehow, even without the use of his hands, he knew how to lure her closer, how to move in the way that made her need to sink her fingers in his hair, how to make her breathless. She pulled away from the kiss and still he stretched up to nuzzle her cheek, his beard ticklish but somehow comforting. 

“You  _ have _ given me mysteries,” she murmured, kissing his cheek in turn. “A queen cannot even  _ try _ to touch the heart of one beneath her without terrible consequence. A friendly touch of the arm is heavy with meaning and obligation when the hand is royal - by the time I was twelve I understood I could neither touch nor be touched beyond my family and my ladies in waiting unless I wanted a year of political wrangling to stay out of petitions for a million favors - or worse, a marriage proposal. I am forever grateful to Beatrice for the discreet introduction to the masked rites at the temple of love for my eighteenth birthday.”

“Hn. I was… much younger when I discovered that way of soothing the skin-hunger,” he confessed softly. “I seized my Name in my ninth winter, and confirmed as Lord of Storms eighteen months later. My early experience was guided by my studies of poetry and sacred writings, and to a lesser degree the adventurous curiosity of other young warriors in my court. I gained an appetite for the delights of experienced avadha at a  _ somewhat _ more proper age. Though there were many who frowned on it, I was  _ king _ , and followed no council but my own if I so chose. By the time I claimed the eighth wind and the War Crown at fifteen, I no longer bothered counting festival dances, and to number my petitions even I would have had to consult scrolls, though there were of course tallies of seedlings and ilmaha.”

“Such a very different culture. It sounds in many ways more free to hold your position, but I can only imagine the amount of other obligations behind it,” Zelda said while teasing a few strands of hair on his chest into a pigtail curl. “With a little thought, I could assuredly count those I’ve enjoyed, it’s been so infrequent. My early experiences were with Beatrice, a dear friend from girlhood days. She brought me word - and later, little tastes - of lessons she learned when serving as a Guardian of Love. Since we are so close in looks, it was not hard to take her place of an evening. And of course my luck made the first a  _ group _ ceremony, adoring the idol of desire with kisses.  _ That _ was a revelation.”

He chuckled darkly, flexing his hands on the headboard and lifting a knee below her. He seemed more tempted to defy the imaginary bonds in a quiet moment than a sensual one.

“ _ Officially _ , of course, I am a maiden beyond reproach, pure and sexless as you imagined.”

He hummed in thought. “Was va’salet in the capital at the time-? If you have a memento or an unwashed object she handled often…” 

“Away with her husband on a diplomatic assignment, thank goodness. Trying to negotiate restoring the old Snowpeak fortress,” Zelda swallowed hard. “I hope the Avosgart manor hasn’t fallen to twilight. It lies just outside of Hyrule proper, three days’ hard ride from the provincial border in  _ good _ weather, so there’s no way to know. I like to think she’s bedding the mistress of the house and spending her days pleasurably.”

He worked his jaw, and looked away again. Fidgeting. Hiding  _ something _ . “I believe much of the Vosterkun province is… outside his influence for now. I can send my scouts when the western roads are more secure. Another week, no more than two.”

“I don’t recall granting you leave to let your mind wander either, my pet,” Zelda said, pinching his nipple to draw him back to  _ her _ . “I should have suspected after your confession about ruining a perfectly good map for your shameful wants, you would just  _ love _ to fill a helpless princess while she services another woman. But  _ here _ I am queen, and my tongue will serve as  _ I  _ see fit.”

“Hn. Wanton creature,” he rumbled, cracking an eye open and shaking his head at her.

Zelda levered herself upright, dragging her nails from shoulder to middle, possessive and consuming, leaving eight long lines upon his body. She wiggled her hips appreciatively as she reviewed her work. She tilted her head and considered for a moment.

“You seem to like it, va’jacheleth,” she said as she raked another set of careful lines to either side of the longest scar, dragging toward his navel.

“Beware the consequences which come to slanderous tongues vo’rajela,” he rumbled with a wicked grin.

“I promise I am very aware, my pet,” Zelda licked the thin line of her upper lip slowly. “You’ve developed quite the fascination with my tongue this evening. I might start to think you’re having  _ impure _ thoughts of it.”

She rested her hands on his hips and shifted herself back further until she felt the heat of his crown against her skin. 

He grunted and shifted his hips under her - no longer as tense as before, but hardly relaxed. Nor was he fully hard - it could not be that he was still spent from earlier - he had no such difficulty  _ while still wounded _ after the Eldin battle. And yet rocking her hips low enough to touch him resulted in little more than nudging his cock still further from her. By the time she knelt astride his hips his heavy shaft indeed lay between his corded thighs, and he’d regained steady control of his breath.

Infuriating man.


	12. Persuasion and Pain

“Of course, what man of your size  _ wouldn’t _ have impure thoughts of lips and tongues,” Zelda cast her eyes down at the valley that encouraged seeking further. She reached down and massaged the join of hip and thigh, working in a gradual looping progression into sodden curls, and back out. 

“Impure is one word for it,” he rumbled.

The next pass she used but the barest scrape of nail against his flesh. She wiggled her hips back to expose the root of his shaft, and as her hands wandered lower, she eased his cock up from between them. His eyes flitted to her hands caressing his shaft against her skin. Even halfway soft, the contrast of his dark strength against her pale softness was wonderfully dramatic. 

“You know you’d have to beg to receive such a gift, and I do believe you have made your position known. Tsk - a shame.”

“On the contrary, size is more often an impediment to the pleasures of tongues.” His brows drew down and he tipped his chin a tiny bit as if vaguely confused. “Whatever mischief you imagine,  _ I do not beg. _ ”

“Oh  _ really _ now. Well.” Zelda tossed her shoulders to resettle the hair on her back, which was immediately undone by shifting further down his body. She pulled her legs out from over his and teased his thighs apart. “You may move as I move you, my pet, and no more.”

“Hn,” he said softly, golden eyes narrowed.

Zelda nestled herself between his knees and caressed his scarred thighs in long, wandering circuits, teasing through the dense, manicured curls cushioning his base until she held his soft cock in her hands.

“ _ Impediment _ ,” she said. She waited for his eyes to focus on her, and gave one long, slow lick from base to crown. He parted his lips to speak, but she cut him off with another taunt. “Unable to enjoy tongues.”

Her tongue swirled around his tip, delving into the half-furled sheath surrounding him.

Ganondorf rumbled something too blurry to make any sense of, halfway between a groan and a sigh. He throbbed in her hands.

And then she blew. Fast. Cold. Precise. Following the same wet path.

His breath hissed sharp and sudden. A glance confirmed his teeth clenched against the intensity of one single tease.

She kissed the soft veil ever so lightly, her fingers massaging the gentle mound and taunting his base with skimming  _ close _ , with kneading the tender flesh on either side as he throbbed and twitched and his cock grew still wider.

“ _ Woman, _ ” he growled.

“Beg for more,” she suggested with a lilt of amusement.

“Hn. I do  _ not _ beg,” he rumbled, his expression stern - but the throbbing under her fingers and the taut, twitching muscles of his strong, scarred thighs told another tale.

“Do you regret such wicked oaths yet?” Zelda said as she tilted her head to rest the veiled ridge dividing shaft from crown just below her lip. “Wouldn’t it fulfill such a deep-seated want to say those small little words and  _ know… _ ”

Zelda watched him as her tongue teased out of her mouth and  _ almost  _ brushed along that soft ridge.

“Hnn,” he said, rolling his lip between his teeth, chin tucked tight as he watched her. 

She coyly smiled and withdrew her tongue. “...what the tongue of your queen feels like?”

“I admire your spirit,” he rumbled. “But your taunts are in vain. I cannot be defeated.”

She answered with her nails gliding gently along his length from base to his widening middle. She encircled him and stroked down.

“Hn. Such a shame,” Zelda said and planted a slow kiss upon his flesh. “I was rather hoping to know your taste. Alas, if you will not beg, then I have only one choice.”

She opened her mouth wide and wrapped her teeth around his cock. She bit down playfully while her nails sought interesting points to grab hold of within his curls and around his base.

“ _ Wicked _ creature,” he groaned, his thighs flexing tight as stone. “Whatever will your brave wolf think when he learns how cruel is his delicate maiden Princess?”

“Mmm what  _ would _ he think,” murmured Zelda as she raised her head, and her hands followed along his shaft. At the top, she let one hand free and started alternating hands to stroke from base to flare of crown. “He is out there cleansing temples taken by twilight. Perhaps he will think I need cleansed, too.”

He snorted in derision.

Zelda reached up to her hair again and released the tiny blade. “Lift his mighty sword and  _ thrust  _ it in skillfully. Cleanse his queen with his brave offering.”

Ganondorf froze. Not that he was moving much to begin with, obedient to her command, but his breath ceased and the beginning of a wry grin that was probably brewing a sardonic retort just… stopped. 

Zelda brandished the tiny knife as before, turning it in the hearthlight while her other hand played through his short curls. The heaviest vein throbbed, and his flesh twitched, but that meant little. She let her hand drift lightly up his shaft as she carefully licked the flat of the blade.

He exhaled slowly, the muscles of his arms twitching as he gripped the ironwood headboard so hard it creaked. 

“Anyways, he is sworn to fight for me, you know. A strong and loyal warrior, even if he is caught in the form of a beast whenever twilight touches him. Why should I care what my brave little pet wolf  _ thinks? _ I have no intention to tell him  _ I _ am as much demon in bed as you,” Zelda grinned, pressing her palm tight to his body as she slid her hand from his base up to the bunched hem of his stormwool shirt. She walked her fingers over the wool to gather it in her fist. She traced the little blade lightly over the fabric. “Unless, of course,  _ you _ want him to know…”

“Zelda,” he murmured.

She waited two, three, five heartbeats to allow him to continue, but though his lips moved, he voiced nothing else. She slipped the blade under the gathered wool and sliced through the fabric. The loose side fell away at once, and she tossed the other wide also. 

His eyes scrunched closed, and the spiritlight in his wounds pulsed, tinted more blue than before. His low voice rasped over his tongue. “Why do you - waste time  _ staring? _ Do it, and be done. I will not yield before your torments. What use is this to you? None! You take pleasure enough in tormenting flesh - if you think I will surrender my spirit also you are more fool than I thought.”

“To think my dearest pet is so terrified of such a little thing. You assure me that if I am not careful some  _ something _ will happen and  _ I _ could get hurt,” Zelda said as she tossed the little blade away. It tinked and rolled on the slate floor and lay still far beyond even his reach unless he should call his magic. “If you want this to end, you  _ will _ have to beg. And though it would please me very much to hear  _ certain _ begging, I will listen to any plea you may have.”

He frowned, brow furrowed deeply. “I do  _ not _ beg.”

Zelda sighed, sliding back so she could bow and kiss the taut dark flesh below the lateral scar, newly revealed by the destruction of the shirt. She had never seen the fullness of the glowing wounds, only glimpses and the general shape of the jagged shards of spiritlight.

They should have killed him many times over. 

Three main angles formed it: the first lay over his heart, short, thick, and smoother than the rest. A deep thrust. Possibly through his back, given how much brighter than the rest. It crossed the longest line, which was much thinner, a lightning-bolt jagged scar which divided him from sternum to navel. It was as if the blade which ripped through his skin had moved in short and sawing strokes, as if it struggled to cut him. The third crossed low, tipped slightly off level, ragged more at the edges than the middle, as if it faltered most at the beginning and ending of the cut. 

As if the hand behind the lateral scar struggled to turn thrust into cut and lost strength in the last third.

As if the hand which would cleave him could only push the blade through his body for a beat or two at a time, from dullness of blade or weakness of arm or the sickness of sadism.

The pain they spoke of made her heart stumble. How he could survive the injury and the hurt boggled the mind, even with his immense power. Hyrule rarely administered mortal judgement anymore, and by law it must be a clean death: the senses numbed by potion and the jugular cut swiftly with a physician’s knife. History claimed the old ways were hanging or beheading or a clean thrust through the heart, depending on the crime. What he suffered instead gave him every possible reason to resent Windblade. Either they tortured him before the fatal blow, or mutilated him afterwards - and though they no longer  _ seemed _ to give him much physical pain, his efforts to hide them argued for a rawness of spirit… and perhaps shame.

“What - what madness takes you-?” He stammered, tucking his abdomen tight. Not that this pulled him out of reach in any  _ real _ way, nor did he defy her order.

“No madness, my pet,” Zelda said softly, placing another kiss against his nearly quivering flesh. “The last thing that kept you hidden from me is gone, and I want your attention on me and me alone. I want you shaking for the things I do, not the things I carry. I will not share with some paltry toy.”

She angled her head down and kissed the top of his silky crown. She levered his thorn upright so she could wrap her lips around him and pulled him into her mouth. She swirled her tongue around his wide head and suckled his soft heat.

“ _ Ohno, _ ” he breathed.

Zelda released him with a pop and glanced up at his eyes as her hand wrapped to the far side of him and stroked him gently. She licked her teeth and waggled her eyebrows at him. “Do I have your attention  _ now _ , va’jacheleth?” 

He tipped his head back and groaned. “ _ S’deasa ikhusa e savai hakoum vo’gamontirre. _ ”

“Hn,” she said, caressing his gently-swollen shaft. “While it could be  _ interesting _ to make you quake in fear while I ride you, it is not a  _ mesvu _ I can bear to wear tonight.”

“What do they  _ teach _ in that temple? Sa’hakoum,” he groaned. He mumbled something, rolling his shoulders. “When did Hyrule trade their order of Light for this - these  _ sadistic _ rituals? Or did this hunger come on you with the fever?”

“The Temple of Love is meant to spark joy and compassion - and keep the sensual meditation traditions  _ and _ erotic arts alive. It’s probably also a reason knights make popular husbands. But Beatrice taught me much in … less than standard ways,” Zelda scraped her nails along his shaft in amusement. “But the hunger - oh, that is all me. Finally, with you, I can be  _ me _ . I crave it. It’s something wholly new and I crave making you ache and slip into your native tongue like that.”

He sighed. “How you erode my discipline rajela’v. In my youth I would  _ never _ have-”

“Tell me, my king. What will happen if you  _ have fun _ while I fuck you stupid? Will the kingdom fall?”

“The world  _ has _ changed -  _ certain _ threads are cut - but I cannot relax my vigilance even in this time,” he countered with a little shake of his head. His flesh stirred under her hand, but he clung to the stoic mask. “Your wolf has promise as a warrior, but Zant is cunning - and more powerful with every acre he claims. Your wolf is neither sorcerer nor healer - even if he gets a lucky strike at the faithless fool, he - cannot do all that must be done, vo’rajela.”

“Not even for one hour?”

He sighed, and his golden eyes seemed to stare right through her.

Zelda sat back on her heels, gazing down at his powerful body and sorrowful scars. “You  _ lied _ , offering me  _ anything _ \- you said  _ whatever flavor you desire _ \- but you will not give me your heart unfettered for even  _ one hour. _ ”

He shook his head, and his lips twisted in the shadow of a wry grin. “Your efforts are futile, rajela’v. You have a  _ talent _ for twisting everything around with that clever tongue. I do not yield, but I will admit I… am  _ perhaps _ a little out of practice leashing my own tongue when I spent so long with no use for it. Your modern Hylian is colder and sharper, lacking nuance where it is most needed, whether for clarity or… certainty. There was a proverb in my youth: what is stolen cannot be given, and to seek it is to break stones for water.”

Zelda covered her mouth as she gasped in horror. Magic had been bleeding out of the world for centuries. The secrets of crafting jewels from the overflowing love and gratitude in a spirit, of sealing malice and despair in sacred crystals, of purifying and transmuting sickness of body and spirit - those mysteries were closely guarded, the masters of the art few and hidden. Even she was barely above an apprentice. Her own mother - a powerful and wise priestess, who unlike her father was more concerned with the spirit of the country than the practical rule - had not not even gained the master’s seal until a few years before the drought took hold. 

But  _ he _ was born in an age of legends and deep enchantment. 

“ _ Oh - _ I’m  _ so _ sorry! I - I knew the scar was bad - I see now it  _ is  _ terribly deep, but  _ oh _ va’jacheleth I didn’t realize!” Zelda lunged at him and wrapped him in the tightest hug she could manage, burying her face against his chest.

“Ah- yes it is… generally that is… the intended consequence of… Zelda? What are you-?”

She shook her head, as shocked by his stumbling as his almost-confession. “I should have  _ known _ you would have good reason to hide it from me. Forgive me - I just wanted to feel your skin, to really  _ look _ at you - to break these stupid walls of shadow between us. But I - I didn’t realize the blow took your heart with it!”

“ _ Zelda, _ ” he sighed. He said nothing else for a moment, but the searing colorless brilliance of the spiritlight said so much. “May I move my hands, vo’rajela?”

“Of course! How could anyone think of continuing that bedgame? Yes please, I’m  _ so _ sorry.”

“That - isn’t necessary. You may keep what pleases you. I do not beg - but I - with you like  _ this _ , I need my hands for a little moment. That is all.” His voice rumbled under her ear, a low and comfortable rumble. The headboard creaked and popped when he released his grasp, as did his wrists when he rolled them and shook the tension from his hands. He touched her shoulder, barely brushing his fingertips over her skin. 

Zelda melted. All the tension left her body at his one simple touch.

He wrapped his strong arms around her. “If all of Hyrule reflected your compassion vo’jachelet, the world of light would be paradise.”

“You say that after I  _ demeaned _ you and tried  _ thrice _ to make you do something you couldn’t do,” Zelda reminded him, soft and sorrowful. “Hyrule reflects my ‘compassion’ all too sharply. I just - I thought I was teasing you the way you teased me. And that you’d like it.”

“Zelda, rajela’v, you have not hurt me,” he rumbled, petting her hair. Soft whispering wool settled over her back - again he poured out magic to offer a simple comfort, quietly and artlessly. 

“You keep calling me that, even when our bedgame is over,” Zelda said. She was silent a moment while she thought. “Your writings never called Windblade that. And … these words. They aren’t casually offered. You have other words for casual endearments. You even humored my indecision with the gems.”

“I told you I keep my word, even in sal’cyrba. These things do not easily translate - what Hylian word approaches the nuance of  _ asali? _ Attachment is too shallow and fondness too insipid, care too soft, coupling too profane, and love too profound. It is to sensibility as  _ areldi _ is to the heart. There was a pun in the Hylian court of those days, likening the dance of persuading the subject of a marriage contract to the act of physical -  _ ah!  _ \- lovemaking! Yes, I told you, hours after I needed it, the word would finally return to me. Sal’cyrba. Making love.”

“Hours after lovemaking, too,” Zelda giggled at her observation.

“Hnn. Indeed. The other - you must understand you have not read it because  _ it was not yet a word  _ when I left those notes and correspondence behind. I wove hope with song -  _ rajena, eshla - _ and with  _ ehv _ I own that it is mine in a way Hylian has no word I have ever found to equal it,” he said, his deep voice smoothed into that soothing rumble which would make a recitation of the lineage of racehorses sound like a lullaby. “I am  _ rajena. _ King. Though - if he only wears the scarab crown -  _ vo’chalut surai _ \- Flower of Dawn - you might more properly translate  _ vo’rajena _ as He Is Prince until he has sat a year and a day as High Chief and offered the hearts of three profane beasts upon the altar to open the Trial of Eight and confirm his claim as _ l’voesh tajli _ . Lord of Storms. Succession among my people  _ never _ , all the way to the first of the Golden Ones,  _ ever _ passed by blood alone.”

“So do you mean  _ princess _ or  _ queen _ when you say  _ rajela? _ ”

“Hn. Yes, that is the very problem. Geld’o had no word nor use for either,” he said with a smug tone. He stroked a hand from the crown of her head all the way down her spine and very nearly upended her entire reason in the process. “A tribal chief is  _ keshara _ , an elder mother  _ kamali _ , a high chief  _ rahallin keshara _ , a leader of the elders’ council  _ rahallin kamali _ . Each of the legions was led by a Roc, and  _ Onchali Sravoe _ , the Exalted Sun, led them all beside me. In the ancient days, we had  _ Onchali Chadali _ also, the moon at the right hand of the king. When the Mother of Sands does not Name a king, or if he should seek a spiritbond, She  _ may _ confirm  _ Asali Sravoe _ \- the Sun’s Heart. It is my hope that recovering artifacts from the ruins may confirm my Exalted rose to lead the People after me, and... somehow… anyway, it is a very different thing from the rank you hold, that your crowns confer. I Name you  _ vo’rajela _ for your spirit was made to wear it, though by necessity I knew it not when I made it.”

“Wait - you are saying this as I name you  _ my king _ \- you are saying I -  _ I  _ stole your heart?”

“Hn.”


	13. Confession and Conquest

Ganondorf chuckled deeply, settling his broad hands upon hip and shoulder, over the mysterious soft wool. “Are you in the habit of holding men to account for the delirium on their tongues when they taste the glories of a sacred maiden embracing them in  _ lovemaking? _ ”

“Answering a question with a question is a  _ bit _ disingenuous,” Zelda turned her head to look up at him. “But let’s say I  _ do _ ask. Every single time. Let’s up the ante - I ask for their confessions while their seed spills for me. Now, if you recall, you offered to me after quite a long statement that you could not give me your heart because it was stolen. As a proverb. Which is not exactly being in the delirium  _ or _ lovemaking. Is it.”

“Hn.”

“Do you surrender and acknowledge I’m right?”

“Never,” he purred.

“You leave me no choice, then,” Zelda levered herself upright. “Your hands are hereby revoked and I  _ shall _ claim what is mine.”

He tipped his head in mild curiosity, and he did not let his hands fall away as she rose. “I should like to see how you intend to achieve that as your very movement renders stillness impossible.”

Zelda rocked all her weight onto one hand and reached across her stomach to grab his sleeve and dragged his hand from her hip. She positioned it over his breast, making him turn his wrist and make him fondle himself. “Stay.”

“Hn,” he said with a wry snort, his golden eyes crinkling at the corners.

She dragged his right hand to his chest also, this time adjusting his fingers to mime him pinching his right nipple. “There. Better.”

“Harlot,” he grumped, but there was no real heat in it.

“There was a vowel shift. Long ‘a’ now,” Zelda grinned wickedly as she tweaked the left to ensure both stood taut for her. She wriggled and shifted upon his body until she straddled his waist again. “So sorry.”

“I should prefer to remain an antique than speak in such a stupid fashion,” he countered archly.

“Ah - do you know the good thing about antiques, va’jacheleth?” Zelda licked her lips as she rocked back and forth until his root lay before her. As she eased his flesh up between them, she licked her lips. “They are built strong. And big.”

“Such  _ curious _ taste for a  _ delicate _ Hylian maiden. One wonders when her avarice and aesthetic predilections ripened into this perilous lust,” he rumbled as she taunted his soft cock.

“Slowly,” Zelda said as her hands encircled him and she teased up his shaft. 

He raised a brow.

“Carefully,” her thumb drew a path up to his crown. On its way down, it met her other going up.

He throbbed in her hands, the first stirrings of renewed desire. It was not enough of a sign alone. His attentive gaze revealed little more - but the spiritlight pulsed - as did the mark of the Chosen on his right hand.

“While between two devotees of love who thought they were given the honor of offering absolutions to the princess’ maiden of the royal bedchamber who looks  _ uncannily _ like the princess when her features are blurred under lace veils,” Zelda pushed her hands down his length and squeezed at his root. “Beatrice is such a darling in so  _ many _ ways.”

“Hn. What a  _ vision _ that must have been,” he rumbled, lip quirking at the corner in that perpetual sardonic smirk. “How  _ exactly _ were you planning to resolve that lavishly erotic desire after your coronation? After elevating a properly highborn Hylian consort?”

“The thing about having servants who adore you is, if you mention you need a trifle of delicate information on someone to help encourage good behavior, you get a  _ mountain _ ,” Zelda’s eyes crinkled as she drew one hand along the far side of his shaft, followed by the other and returning the first to root and join the pattern again. “So I would simply find someone with known similar tastes... or one for whom there is sufficient evidence he never speaks. Or… do whatever I want because I am queen, and as long as the country runs well no one could stop me because  _ I _ have information on everyone.”

“The duplicity and intrigues of the Hylian court apparently have changed even less than your art,” he grumbled. “Nonetheless. I think your cavalier manner fragile as wet ricepaper - you would not keep your equanimity long should the captain of your guard find you en flagrante delicto with another buried to the hilt in your elegant ass, and nevermind your court find you at the center of a hedonist’s feast. Hyrule was appalled by the sensual aspects of our ancient festival traditions - what would they do with a Queen fallen to even greater depravities-?”

“Hn. You are correct. It wasn’t a very well thought out plan. One spends a lot more time on administration than idle fantasy when one is born into a line of succession, bound to a land which soon after lay under siege,” Zelda put one hand to her mouth and licked it, palm to fingertip. She reached down and swirled it around Ganondorf’s crown. “Though I have an idea  _ now _ how we might better manage all of those little details in one conveniently big, strong antique.”

“ _ Ah _ rajela’v, you  _ tease _ me so,” he murmured, his thighs tensing under her.

“Oh, I plan to do so much more than  _ tease _ , my pet,” Zelda placed both hands on his crown and stroked downwards, first with one hand followed by the other, reversing the pattern set earlier. “I just wasn’t sure exactly  _ how _ I would claim you. I thought about lips and tongue, and suckling until you were too big - quite a pity you didn’t beg for that, but it is what it is. Another time, perhaps. But now. Oh, now I intend to make you watch, make you see  _ exactly _ what you look like entering me.  _ Delicate maiden.  _ You’ll never be able to utter those words again without thinking about how I claimed your beast of a cock.”

“You - you must not listen to the voice of ambition or you  _ will _ hurt yourself,” he said, as his flesh answered her taunts with growing heat and firmness. He rose far more slowly than the knightly devotees at the temple, and the manner of his increase alternating among length and hardness and girth progressed far differently than she imagined. Until now, he came to her already hard, and between dances usually lost little of it, only softening and laying down his heaviness.

“The king of light and shadow will lecture  _ me _ on ambition?” Zelda laughed and squeezed his shaft between both hands. She arranged him at a convenient low angle, easing her hips forward until she felt his hot girth pressing against her folds - and  _ then _ . She set a new pattern upon him. Quick up his length, then a slow press back down his root. With each stroke, she felt him slide more easily along her folds as her silk began to coat him. “Your milk is already mine, my pet. You will not dissuade me from my claim on it.”

“ _ Hnn _ ,” he said, craning his neck a bit to peer down his broad torso, between his still hands to see how she ground against him. “This much -  _ mmnyes _ \- to be embraced by your sweet valleys - why should I ever refuse that? You are  _ soft _ as moonflower rajela.”

She grinned down at him and slid her hands down and wide to dig her nails into his trim waist, well clear of the scar. She ground against him, wriggling her folds into an even better arrangement and pressing her clit against the subtle rise of his veiled crown. “Your resistance belies such flattery my pet - but even though you refuse to offer your regal girth, I  _ will have _ this delicious ridge, mnnf.”

He licked his lips and grunted, golden eyes riveted on the slick sliding press of their flesh. He watched her engulf him, and he watched her slide back to reveal his ruddy tip and drag his veil lower, fraction by fraction. He throbbed for her, thickening delightfully, until his shaft offered her pressure from apex to gates as she rolled her hips. “Mnnf. Stroke that tender bud over just the -  _ yes _ like that - just a little moment -  _ use _ the ridge to pleasure your precious jewel rajela.  _ Ahtu _ , ahtu -  _ oh _ your oasis is a treasure.”

She chuckled and followed his suggestion for a moment, pleased to see his tongue peeking between his teeth. His heat increased under her, and when she stroked further back, pushing her aching gates against the low arc of his trapped shaft, the veil proved to have retreated to the flare of his corona. She licked a fingertip and teased his ruddy crown with a tiny whorl.

He rewarded her with a gasp.

Small, subtle, nowhere near enough.

But it was a beginning.

“I couldn’t do  _ this _ in the temple either,” she confessed breathily. She rolled her hips again, stroking herself on him, and he was right - the ridge did pluck strings of delight in her core, especially when he began to allow tiny moans to sneak into his breath. 

He worried his lip between his teeth, and he did use the position she’d given him to pinch and twist his own nipple when she ground harder and faster over the intense little flare. 

She relented for a moment, in part to catch her own breath. Thrusting so much  _ was _ a challenge. “Devotees came -  _ ha! _ \- more than ready to serve, you know. The rituals of arousal were more a matter of teasing and edging along a desire already stoked or reviving their strength between ‘prayers’. I never brought one from quiescence to  _ this. _ ”

“Hn. It is only by discipline and experience that any man inclined to  _ vai _ figures might resist the prick of fleshly lust before your beauty if his body is capable of it,” he rumbled, his golden eyes soft upon her.

“Mmm - almost a confession you like the small, delicate woman as much as I like the big, strong man,” Zelda moaned the ending. “It makes me wonder how many lucky Hylian ladies were able to enjoy you in ages past. If the courts are  _ just  _ as you recall, then the bedgames everyone falls into must have been just as frequent.”

“Hn. I bedded few Hylians of any shape, but there… is a certain attraction in the contrasts. Not that there was ever much choice unless my spirit should have been a chaste one. Few lovers even among my people ever came near my size in any dimension, Zelda. If I had not learned to find pleasure in my strength, I should never have had any at all.”

“I know  _ I  _ certainly found pleasure in your strength,” Zelda rocked her hips into his shaft sharply. “So much so that I was overflowing with it not long ago.”

The longer she tried to rouse him, the more her core reminded her it was  _ empty _ and he was  _ right there _ . Leaning back to seal the gates with his heavy length pressed against them felt wonderful in itself, but her flesh throbbed to feel him far deeper than that would allow. 

She refused to yield to temptation until his silky flesh grew drum-taut, until his length increased to reach nearly to his navel, until his girth was so intense even she began to hear a nagging doubt that he would ever fit within. He had before - but what if his warnings held truth? What if he  _ had _ been holding back? What if he’d chosen to enter her the moment he was firm enough to manage so he wouldn’t swell  _ too _ much?

Zelda slid back further, resting astride his thighs and releasing his shaft to rise skyward with his throbbing. She stroked him a little in encouragement, and pressed his slick cock against her bare skin. Looking down at him like that, she could never think of that perspective as the idle amusement she’d toyed with from time to time when mounting a supine knight. His tip seemed to strike well above her womb, barely a hand below her ribcage.

He  _ must _ be larger than before. He was impossibly huge.

Her idiot flesh would hear none of it. Her cunt clenched and trembled and drooled as she gazed down at him and gently stroked his cock.

If she was honest with herself, her tongue drooled also.

“You are radiant rajela’v,” he murmured. “Sa’streka how I want you. Don’t stop. Don’t pull away for the sake of any stupid Hylian customs for _proper_ _order_ between voe and vai. Ride the spine until you cum over me. Release me that I may caress you, that I may adore you as your jewel releases your flood of honeywine again.”

“Pull away? Hardly,” Zelda idly stroked him while pressing him against her. “Just - looking down at you, I have so many thoughts and questions and  _ wants _ that I - just need to marvel a moment. Do you like it? The view of your thorn against my entire body?”

He licked his lips. “I do not wish to hurt you.”

“That is not what I asked, my pet,” she chided, twisting her hand down his shaft, stroking him tight to her body.

“I - do have an appetite for conquest,” he rumbled softly. He worked his jaw and let his eyes follow her caress for a moment in quiet. “Looking at you like this tempts that hunger to visit  _ terrible _ acts on your fragile, moon-pale Hylian body until you are marked and broken and drenched in seed and begging for mercy. Even after using every art in my command to coax your flower to blossom enough to make it  _ possible _ to move inside you gently - the vision of forcing you wide and impaling you on my spear  _ will not _ leave me. Looking at the truth of how my monstrous thorn would wreck you if I forget myself for a moment - yes, I  _ do _ like it,  _ and _ I hate it.”

Zelda leaned forward, trapping his hard shaft between them. She planted a kiss against his salty skin, and rocked her hips against him.

Followed by another kiss, slightly higher, and pulled her folds up his shaft. She hissed and gasped at the intense pressure of him pressing back.

“Goddesses, that makes me feel hot and  _ monstrously _ empty,” Zelda groaned. “Tell me again. How it starts in the library.”

“Nnf. Zelda  _ please _ ,” he groaned, scrunching his eyes closed.

“Tell me,” she insisted, grinding her gates as tight to his thickness as possible. It only made her mind fill with the need to fulfill that emptiness, and she wondered if he felt the same.

“I - I would fill my hands with your soft thighs and pin you to the table. Your skirts would gather about your waist, and I - would dig my thumbs into your skin to pull your lips wide, to the edge and past your undergarments, and how the silk would darken with your honey…”

Zelda moaned and flexed her thighs at the image in his confession. She inched up his body and kissed the soft flesh just below his ribcage. The flare of his crown pressed against the middle of her mound and she felt her excitement grow with her unfurling plan. “I can imagine your rumbling voice telling me you would delve into my well and soil it with your cock.”

“S-sometimes,” he confessed with a little hiss. “I might unlace myself and command you to look up on your doom. I would always be in armor for such a - forceful vision. I would command you open your bodice, and watch your hands fumble as I stroked myself in hand and against the wet silk. In those you might beg, or you might question, and I would command you to confess the urges of your flesh, to voice every fear and fancy you hid under maidenly protests.”

Zelda wiggled further still and pressed her hot wanton gates along him, and bit her lip in pleasure as she felt his ridge part her folds as she began to soak his crown. She stopped when she felt him slide up, heart racing at the thought of him taking her  _ and _ the hope that her next plot would work. “Yes,  _ more _ . What next, my pet. What scandalous, lustful, forbidden thing would you do next unto your captive enemy? Spare no detail.”

He winced and fidgeted under her, pressing his hips deep into the mattress. He licked his lips more than once, and she gave him time to gather his wits and courage.

“If you refused to caress yourself for me, I would threaten… or… begin… to bind and mark and pierce and… when I was dripping with your honey I would take the silk away and run my fingers over your naked sex and… between your lips and… through your folds to make you writhe and beg.”

“ _ For-? _ ” Zelda prompted, rolling her hips to enjoy his throbbing even more fully. “Come now my pet, do you crave a hungry cry of awakening lust or a humble plea of denial and fright?”

He bit his lip.

“Tell me,” she urged, tilting her hips and resettling herself to grind against his burning tip.

“I dream  _ both _ ,” he whispered. “I am as selfish and wicked a beast as she ever accused me of, for both ways have I imagined parting your gates enough to rest my crown in the hollow. I dream of you helpless and spread open in my hands and how I might plunge into a tight burning maiden-“

Zelda rocked firmly back against him. Her gates parted around his wide crown as she thrust him into her vestibule with a cry of pleasure and victory.

He too cried out, in shock and rising delight.

Zelda took three deep breaths and felt herself flex around him. He  _ was  _ holding back. Not very much - and not for long, if she could help it. She just needed a moment. Her fingers dug into his side as she readied her next move. “Gods - don’t stop. What … what would you do next, how do you long to despoil a ripe little virgin Hylian furnace? What do you dream when I open for you?”

He panted for air, his hands flexing and clenching on his chest. “ _ Oh _ sa’hakoum your swollen cunt - to be sheathed in your burning oasis-!”

“Nnnyes,” Zelda panted and bit at the base of his ribcage. “Do you - ah - do you threaten to push all the way in and claim every inch of me as your right of conquest?”

Zelda eased her hips down accompanied by a low moan until his crown made a sharp popping sensation as she pushed it past her gates. 

“ _ Hnnnyes _ wide and  _ deep _ , mine, stretched for me,  _ mine _ , everything,  _ all mine _ \- make you  _ mine _ ,” he groaned, arching his back - but he pulled his hips down, threatening to slip out even as he babbled about ruin and thrusting and spreading and impaling and plowing and claiming.

“ _ Ohh _ no you don’t,” Zelda said as she rocked her hips down against him with a gasp. “A-anything I desired. I  _ desire _ to have every bit I can!”

Zelda felt full. So, so full. And still  _ empty _ in enough ways that needed fulfilled. She unclenched her thighs from him and took a deep breath. She thrust her hands against his chest, sweaty skin clinging as she pushed herself down his body. She felt him slide in, his ridge less shocking the second time. She paused when that feeling of emptiness became  _ slightly _ less pressing.

“ _ Mine _ ,” she breathed.

He groaned, his whole body a knot of tension beneath her. “Rajela’v, rajela’v, jachelet rajela - be  _ careful _ , you don’t know, you don’t.”

Zelda played hands and lips over his body, resettling her stance with one leg folded on his thigh to give her better leverage to move upon him. “ _ Show _ me then - give yourself to me, give me everything, stop holding back my king.”

Ganondorf groaned in denial, low and resonant.

Zelda flexed and rolled, smaller than the little waves of Lake Hylia she moved upon him, beckoning him deeper with every undulating pass, seeking that tingle in her ear and the tremble in her core that she’d discovered with him. She demanded he beg, she prompted him to ask for her lips, her hands, her teeth, her nails. He agreed to her rough proposals, he growled how he would return it tenfold, but he remained helpless beneath her, his subtle squirming evasions fruitless so long as he obeyed her command to remain in the position she gave him. She bit and clawed at his middle, his chest, his sides, his shoulders, anywhere she could reach as she strove to conquer him.

“ _ Yes _ ,” he cried, whether she touched him with tenderness or roughness, his golden eyes unfocussed. “Zelda, rajela, oh  _ sing _ and I will fill you. Don’t stop,  _ oh _ not yet, not yet, sa’deasa how I want you-!”

Zelda flexed and relaxed and wiggled her hips. He shifted inside of her, his girthy crown settling comfortably where lesser men often ended. She let herself lay heavily upon his strong body, resting, breathing deep, dragging the reflexive panting back under control. Her hands grew still as she craned her neck to gaze up through the brilliant spiritlight and meet his eye as he too struggled with breath. She licked her lips. “Say it again. Say you will fill me if I sing, o va’rajena, my glorious king.”

He gazed at her with such burning intensity her very bones trembled. “ _ Esha’vo rajela _ . Sing your ecstasy for me and I will pour you full. Let the storm come to you, and you will overflow with milk and honey.”

Zelda gathered her strength and drew a deep breath. Her cheeks burned for the startled  _ eep _ on her tongue when the barest beginning of bracing to rise shifted him within her. She caressed his chest and pushed herself upright. The heat of him pressing into her forward walls was  _ sublime _ , and she struggled to focus and keep her legs under her as she cautiously realigned their angle. She must keep her head so she wouldn’t slip too early and bring Ganondorf’s fear to pass.

She brought her knees up onto his thighs, gathering her strength. With Hylian knights she could kneel properly astride to mount them, but with his bulk - and regal endowments - she needed the extra height to even think of it. She allowed a sigh, lifting her hands from him. She wiggled her hips experimentally and was rewarded with a shifting feeling just within the gates. 

“There,” she took a deep breath. Her depths aligned with his shaft - the temptation to sink down at once and make him roar was immense. “Ready, my king?”

“ _ Zelda _ ,” he breathed, his eyes flicking down her nakedness to the tenuous connection of their flesh. “Don’t be a fool.”

“Have a little trust in someone beside yourself, va’jacheleth,” Zelda said as she slid her hands up her own body. She lifted her heavy breasts, cooling the flesh and surreptitiously clearing sweat away. She rather missed the short, soft stays she wore for temple visits. Brushed Labrynnan cotton and Lurelin bobbin lace - light, feminine, just enough support to maintain an elegant silhouette… and incidentally prevent vulgar jiggling and wet slaps and the like. Ganondorf  _ never _ let her keep the long stays once he began undressing her.

“Princess-“ he began.

“I  _ can _ in fact know when I can’t go any further. Now enjoy yourself - I know  _ I _ intend to enjoy yourself.”

He groaned, muttering her name, her titles, epithets to his gods and the heavens. His hands flexed and clenched, and his little fidgets against the bed rolled through his thighs, challenging her balance as she tested a few tiny little lifts and miniscule descents. Her own thighs burned with the effort of supporting all her weight while measuring her movement so carefully. She braced her hands on her thighs, and prayed kneeling in square on his body to give her the control she needed wasn’t hurting him.

Not that he would admit it if so.

The tiny little hints of moans sneaking into his breaths made her head spin, and she wanted to take more of him, to stretch herself around his thickness again, to claim all of him - but she needed to be as careful with him in this moment as she ever was in a temple ritual. Not for reverence and mystery and elegance this time, but to guard a wounded heart. A moment of inattention and his anxiousness might well return. He might challenge her command. He might stop her. He might cry  _ mesvu  _ and end everything.

But oh-! How her thighs ached already.

“My king - your hands, give me your hands,” she panted, gesturing urgently.

“Sa’streka - Zelda,  _ Zelda _ jachelet rajela’v,” he groaned. He reached for her, fingers seeming to tremble on her knees, over the curve of her taut thighs.

She seized his right hand in both of her own and carried it to her lips.

He sighed deeply, his eyes thinning to bright golden slashes - and when she braced herself against his arm and sank down upon his burning cock, his cry became a rough and resonant single note, filling her ears and echoing back from whitestone walls and slate floors.

“ _ Yes _ my king, _ esha’va-! _ ” Zelda demanded, though her own traitorous moan likely stole any authority from it.

The marks of the Chosen blazed on their hands, and he was so very enormously wonderful. Her ears rang and her core clenched, and lightning coiled in the cradle of her hips. Her tender gates screamed in agony - her depths howled in want. She lifted herself and tried again, and again, straining to overcome the fantastically swollen girth of his mid-shaft. 

She clung to his hand, she cradled his palm over her heart - only partly in sentiment. So long as she held herself at a favorable angle for it, she could keep his glorious crown from thrusting against the trembling warning of madness that threatened to steal all order from her flesh. Even a  _ little _ tilting back would be too much unless she rose all the way to the tugging tenuous thrill of his corona catching on the inside of the gates. Only there was it safe to let his heat press the front walls, and even so the word was stretched near to breaking.

He babbled, beginnings of words, half-formed syllables, his thunder resonating through her body. Every time she descended upon him, his voice rose. The hand on her right thigh arched in a savage claw. His broad fingers dimpled her flesh. He gave her a wonderful ache, offering his ecstasy to her, his body confessing with every stroke how desperately he wanted more.

She nearly gave up on hilting all of him, feeling halfway wild with the  _ almostness _ of the divine madness so very close. She resolved to attend the mystery of what  _ exactly _ was happening when his cock made her mind go blank, and try for his entirety another time. She ground against the impossible vastness of his middle one last time, tilting her hips to test the angle for the next rise - and finally,  _ finally _ , with a startling sudden blaze of eigengrau, the tight settledness became a very  _ peculiar _ fall.

She howled.

_ He _ howled.

Reason left. She trembled upon him, a mess of mortal scraps impaled on his mighty cock, sinking helplessly lower because her legs _ would not  _ do anything else.

He howled and cried, wordless and wild, his voice filling the world, his hands shaking, his cock throbbing so deep within her.

She could not move. Without his hands she would surely have fallen. She could not dredge up the strength to bring him off with thrust nor roll. Nothing. All she could do was tremble and clench around him and be dizzy with the thrum of nonsense scrambling her senses.

Victory came as a soft squish, an afterthought, a thing she only knew later, when the fog of ecstasy began to ease and they found themselves so deeply entangled that the poetic milk and honey flooding between them threatened to bind them thus for always.


	14. Softly Into Night

Twilight muted the stations of the day to a formless dissolving haze, the few markers so subtle it was difficult to remain rooted at all, especially with the sleepless anxiety and loneliness inextricably bound up in Zant’s curse upon her country and her flesh. The fire burned down to embers, a scattering of dim red under a veil of ash. Ganondorf offered to summon fresh seasoned logs into the hearth, but Zelda refused. She clung to the strange and rarified comfort of drowsing entangled with her enigmatic lover in the darkness, warmed between the heat of his powerful body and layers of soft wool which he claimed to have woven himself, long ago.

She had no real reason to doubt him, except that it was strange. A king, a warlord, a scholar, a sorcerer -  _ and _ a weaver? The world and culture he came from seemed even more wildly foreign the more she learned of it. She could not begin to imagine what he must feel to be ripped from everything he knew and imprisoned in solitude for centuries while the world turned without him. 

And yet he lay with her in softness, apparently content to remain entwined in companionable silence for hours. Sometimes he seemed even to sleep under her, but she could not bear to test her theory and risk waking him if it was so.

If he was awake, he did not seem to mind when  _ she _ fell asleep.

Zelda never expected to be at ease sleeping with anyone in the room and nevermind her bed - even trusted servants going about their work always roused her a little. It was part of the reason she had always preferred the traditional Crown Princess’ tower to any of the more modern royal suites in the central keep. She’d attributed the prior nights to sheer exhaustion and the consequence of losing more land to Twilight - but the borders had not moved in several days. She could no longer deny to herself the unsettling truth: she was growing more than fond of his company and his sharp wit and his sensual virtues. 

The entire idea of marriage had always made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t explain why - she had witnessed happy unions and troubled ones both, but she didn’t feel the pull towards making a family that some did, nor the kind of swooning romantic sentiments which consumed much of her ladies’ conversation. She treasured her few friendships, and she found solace in physical connections, but shuddered at the thought of binding herself to any of them day in and day out, forever. The highborn and foreign suitors were even worse. She knew rationally she would have to settle on someone eventually and fulfill her duty to pass on the blood and blessings of Hylia, but the troubles of the land and people were so much more immediate. Succession could wait.

Her parents’ marriage seemed a happy enough alliance, and though her own mother could bear no more children after her, she gave her blessing for the king to enlarge their family if he wished. Some of the council frowned on the liason, but no one could say Mistress Irina was not a faithful companion to the royal family, a good friend to the queen, and a loving parent to her  _ officially _ fatherless children. Zelda’s half-sibs were a joyful part of their lives, and though they all mourned the separation when Irina left with the children to shelter with her family in Castor in the early days of the drought, they all agreed it was best. Especially as circumstances worsened.

Zelda hid the cursed change from everyone, though every hour maintaining the illusion drained her strength immensely. 

She wondered if her mother did the same.

She wondered if Midna honored her plea to seek the Yarat estate and offer the same spell to transmute the Change into easier-to-hide blackened naevi if she too suffered for the Twilight consuming the land. 

A riding accident while directing the firefighting efforts in the west provinces stole her father’s strength and independence. He announced his decision to abdicate a few weeks later, when the best healers they could secure decreed it unlikely he would ever walk again. The Queen laid plans to remove to her family home outside Yarat, in the mountainous Vosterkun province, far from the fires and supplied by a mountain spring unaffected by the drought which gripped the rest of the country. They were supposed to leave after Zelda’s coronation.

Six northern garrisons sent the same urgent messages to the capital not two days after the decision: Zant’s twisted, monstrous legions appeared from nowhere, rank after rank of them advancing over the weathered stones of ancient border walls. Where they walked the sky turned black and every living creature either twisted into frightening, ravenous wights or else dissolved into motes of shadow. Zelda ordered the coronation postponed, and the evacuation of the essential ministries of government into the south. She sent her family and friends to the mountains. She ordered curfew for the capital and tightened the water rationing as she gathered the army.

Not that it mattered, in the end.

No mortal weapon was enough against the boundless enchantments of the Twilight King.

When the capital fell, she offered desperate terms of surrender in hopes of saving as many lives as she could. Where there was life, there was still hope.

Hyrule slowly dissolved into Zant’s twisted realm of shadows and despair, and the people lost their connection to Light and hope and mortal form.

And then from the same shadows… Ganondorf came.

Zelda lay entangled with the ancient king, and prayed in silence for the return of health and peace and light to Hyrule, as she had every wakeful hour since the disaster began. She prayed to see that Light in the aftermath of whatever Victory might look like.

Tonight, she also added a prayer that the gods allow they guide the Restoration together.

_ Asali Sravoe, rajela Zelda Hyrule, e Ghed vo’Ganondorf, jacheleth va’rajena. _

It sounded well.

“Hn,” rumbled Ganondorf softly, his arms tightening around her. His  _ bare _ arms, for in the aftermath of her conquest she had persuaded him out of the rags of his shirt at last.

If he would hold her like that every night, perhaps a state marriage wouldn’t be as lonely and awkward as she feared.

That they would encounter more differences and difficulties and argue fit to break pottery was absolutely certain. But perhaps… if they could make it through to the other side of the Twilight War together, then there was hope they might always find a way to repair peace between them as well.

Beneath her, Ganondorf’s stomach growled, and a more mundane and intensely human thing she could not even imagine.

“Hnnnm’ _ zel _ ,” he murmured, his embrace jolting suddenly, graceless in the way of drifting consciousness.

“It’s ok, you’re ok, I’m here,” she answered, petting his chest.

“Mnn. Rajela’v,” he sighed, drawling and blurry, unfairly adorable. Especially when his stomach roared again. “Mmnrf.  _ Ne han. _ ”

“It’s fine. I’m a bit hungry myself,” she murmured, uncertain if he was conscious enough to really hear her.

“Hn. Summon, jus’ moment,” he rumbled, stroking a hand down her back idly.

“No need to rush, va’jacheleth,” Zelda ran her hand slowly over his chest, enjoying the sensation of his skin and soft curls under her hand. “You are allowed to wake up first, you know.”

She did not really expect him to listen.

For all he was a brilliant tactician on the field, he was  _ terribly _ predictable in personal matters. He roared in temper and retreated into cold brooding entirely too often, kept secrets where he would do better to speak, and clearly harbored thoughts and fantasies that could certainly seem frightening…  _ if _ one never bothered to notice the nuance between his words. 

And also. 

The fearsome ancient warlord roused from a rare restfulness to attend  _ her _ needs. He gestured vaguely in the direction of the hearth, and in direct opposition to her word a footed tray appeared, laden with bread and cheese and bottles of olives and preserved dates and carrots. His iron teapot arrived a moment later, nestled among the embers to steam.

Zelda’s mouth watered as her stomach told her she was a lot more hungry than she thought. Also, there was a distinct  _ something _ she craved that wasn’t on the table. She wasn’t sure what it was, and she wasn’t about to say anything lest her beloved’s mood shift. Again. 

“You stay put,” Zelda patted his chest, yawning, and shifting her weight to slide off of him. “Goddesses bright, how did you conjure  _ fresh _ bread? It smells like it’s right from the ovens.”

“Hn. Not conjure. Summon,” he rumbled, allowing her to unwind his arms only with measurable effort. “Blins are loyal, simple. Watch patrols are six hours, always bread and chiba for watchchange. Good for morale, health, discipline.”

Zelda worried her lip. She couldn’t bear the thought of taking food from the mouths of any of the blins, though the three that were her personal retinue were of course the ones that came most to mind. She watched his face hoping to catch some sign that her fear was misplaced. “They’ll still have plenty for themselves, yes?” 

Ganondorf laughed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Growing fond of demons are you, Princess?”

“Whatever else they are, blins are  _ people _ . Nobody deserves to go hungry, and you didn’t answer the question,” Zelda chided him as she levered herself into a more upright position. The tendons in her arm plucked a tingling note and warned her that it was going to fight any use. “But you have no intention of answering that because clearly we are somebody and also hungry. Which is fair.”

He shook his head with a sardonic chuckle, releasing her with an ostentatiously dismissive gesture. “Troublesome creature, forever tying words in knots for the sheer cursed delight of making mischief. Go on and pour us honey with some tea in it unless you want me to summon the  _ entirety _ of the baking for this shift and watch to see if it humbles you.”

“Impossible man,” Zelda rolled her eyes as she shifted and pulled herself to the edge of the bed. Her arm did in fact attempt to betray her, but she managed to shift her weight before collapsing gracelessly. 

_ And why do I care if he sees me weak now? _

Pride was the only answer she could come up with, which was sure to change after tea and a loaf or three of that maddeningly fragrant bread.

She swung her feet to the floor and tried to ignore the chill of the stone. 

She promptly found herself back on the bed with a sharp notice from her knees that she had a ravishingly good time and they would be taking their leave.

“Fuck,” she said.

“Indeed,” he drawled in that infuriatingly smug tone.

Zelda slapped his thigh.

He laughed.

Because  _ of course _ he did.

“If I recall correctly, I believe your exact words were:  _ I can in fact know when I can’t go any further _ ,” he teased, tempering the censure with rolling onto his side behind her and caressing her back. “I seem to remember some manner of hubris regarding beastly cocks and dire threats upon my life if I should gainsay you in the matter. Then again  _ perhaps _ I have dreamed nonsense again, and the sodden ruin in which I awaken is a  _ mystery _ , never to be solved, yeah?”

“Hn. It sounds like you may be wanting to acquire your own tea,” Zelda raked her claws against his thigh, tilting inwards to get some soft spot just below his languid cock. “I know exactly how far I can go. As you correctly remember. Right now, that is here for at least the next half minute. It would entertain me to see how  _ your  _ legs fair, oh my king.”

“Terrible as it must be to feel disappointment rajela, I am disinclined to demonstrate,” he returned, his voice rising and thinning suspiciously when her touch drifted towards his inner thigh. A series of tiny, regular little ridges hid under the curve, which she’d not noticed before.

Zelda paused, worrying her lip and debating whether to say anything about them as she traced one after the other, identical hypertrophic scars. 

“Kiss me,” purred Ganondorf.

“Kisses are not tea,” Zelda chided him even as she turned and crawled just far enough up the bed she could prop her chin on her nested fists and taunt him inches from his lips. “And you aren’t disappointing me. I fucked you so hard you can’t move. You just conveniently proved it. Oh my king.”

His bright golden eyes crinkled, and he tilted himself close, closer, murmuring his words onto her skin, his broad crooked nose teasing butterfly-light against hers. “Base slander. If I desired to move, I would move.  _ Kiss me. _ ”

Zelda pressed forward and her heart missed a beat as her lips met his. She lingered in the tender benediction, enjoying the sweet spice and heat of him, and found that she’d forgotten an important step. Breathing.

He pulled away and touched his brow to hers, nuzzling her nose gently as he purred for her. “Your stomach is growling at me, Princess.”

“Your fault,” she panted.

“Hn. I’m not sorry,” he said, ducking close to claim her lips again. He threaded his fingers carefully into her tangled hair, dragging his blunt nails against her scalp in the way that made the  _ inside _ of her head feel ticklish and pleasantly dizzy.

What matter a little hunger when there was ambrosia to sip?


	15. Gentleness At Midnight

Eventually they managed to regain their senses.

Or rather, their ravenous empty stomachs forced the matter. He summoned furs to lounge on before the fire, into which he also summoned good quartered ash. He took the enormous new highpeak woolen shawl from her desk chair and draped her in the kitten-soft red floral cloth, solicitous of her comfort.  _ He _ remained naked, against all prior habits.

It did not grow any easier to look upon his scars. 

She tried not to stare. She didn’t feel ready to ask about them. Not yet. There was no possibility the story would leave this rare and precious peace intact. 

They spoke little, devouring the simple feast in a strangely comfortable quietude. He insisted she accept some herbal liquors blended in her tea, and mixed some in his own as well - if it could still be  _ called _ tea with the amount of honey he spooned into it. She teased him a little for his hummingbird appetite, and he chuckled, admitting the flaw readily.

She stared in abject shock.

“Come, if you are finished, let us get you into a hot bath and attend that unholy wreck you call hair as was the entire original point eight hours ago,” he said, rising to his knees. “I will tell you a little story of the trouble sweets have led me into while you soak away some of the consequence of your excessive ambitions before they become any worse.”

“I would enjoy that. I have already thought of a proverb for what I expect to hear. _For want of a macaron, the king was lost_ ,” Zelda grinned and accepted his hand to rise as he laughed at her. She pulled the shawl tight around her shoulders and chewed her lip. “So you’ve made a show of summoning all these small myriad things. You aren’t the sort to _usually_ traipse around skyclad. Are you about to summon all those barrels of water up here, too?”

“Do you require the  _ barrel? _ ” Ganondorf countered with a transparent pretense of surprise.

“I hate you,” Zelda huffed. “Also I need to learn that trick.”

He laughed, pressing her hand as he pushed to his feet with a little grunt of effort. He tucked her hand in the crook of his arm as if he would escort her to a courtly function and not her own dressing room. “It is a different sort of magic from your charming light-gates, though perhaps eventually deeper study will show us the way of adapting the pattern. Come - it is simpler when at least one target is within sight.”

She humored him, amused he measured his stride to hers for once. Zelda could not even pretend to be surprised he lit all the candle-lamps with a wave of his hand. Instead of casting by will alone, he drew intricate patterns in the air which mirrored upon the sculpted flora of the wall-mounted fountain as a lacework of golden light, tangled here and there with threads of dark purple. The hotspring water steamed as it poured into the crescent-shaped basin below it, and then overflowed into the tiled square bath. Faceted firerock shards appeared in little plain pots in each corner to  _ keep _ it hot, exactly as the blins had warmed the copper tub in the kitchen.

Once, the copper pipes inside the serene painted porcelain had been fed by cisterns on the floor above, but she’d sealed those in the second year of the drought, to stave off temptation, and in the fourth year routed the pipes away to feed the most critical sanitary functions instead. He awakened it by weaving a tiny clever gate to some barrel or other halfway across the castle, and turned his attention at once to laying a fire in the hearth which warmed this half of her suite. 

Also by magic.

Zelda sighed, and unwound her arm from his to fetch soap and oil and combs.

He interrupted his summonings to watch her rummage in the cabinets. “Hn? You are displeased-?”

“Not the word I would choose,” she grumbled, debating the scent. “It seems a prodigious waste to use  _ magic _ for such mundane little trivial-”

“These are  _ not _ trifles,” he cut in, shaking a finger at her with a stern expression. “The health of the monarch affects the land as much as the reverse. I have indulged your ridiculously ascetic habits more than enough already.”

“I do not wish to cause offense,  _ and also _ ,” Zelda gestured to the room, or maybe castle, or all of Castletown. It hardly mattered which as the situation was still the same. “You’ve seen the castle, and have made journeys further. Besides the clever little lamps in the library and the  _ one _ I keep for myself, do you see many things that operate with magic? The things you’ve casually done in the last few minutes would make any witch or sorcerer of my time renounce their robe and title and never cast again. My age is not known for wonders like yours is, where apparently  _ everyone _ was a grand adept. I beg pardon for learning that all things must come from  _ somewhere _ , must come from  _ work _ , must be  _ rationed. _ ”

“Sa’deasa,” he groaned, rolling his eyes. He crossed the little room to cup her shoulder and draw her close. “Come, set aside your enmity for just one more little hour Princess. The fact of enchantments and those who bear the gift of working them growing rare, the sorry truth of magic bleeding from this world was never an accident, but as I told you before: that time of fog and ignorance is nearing an end, whether you stand with me or against me in the end. You have  _ seen _ the greater Works I weave. My power is more than sufficient to make my Will become in these simpler matters, yeah?”

“As you say. There is no way I have of knowing what is costly or not. Our scale is as a winterberry and yours is as a  _ damn _ hydromelon,” Zelda sighed as she selected a sandalwood oil and a second comb. “I just - as I’m sure you know, it’s hard to be one way for so long and suddenly try to  _ not _ keep that habit in thought and action. You’ve seen our collected data. Looking at tables is a matter of minutes. I’ve  _ lived _ the years of it.”

“I do know,” he rumbled softly, petting her hair. He pried the bottle from her hand and whisked it further away to the ledge of the bath by magic. He pulled her against his body, trapping her in his strong arms. 

Barefoot, she stood barely to the middle of his chest, and would have to raise up on her toes and  _ stretch _ to catch his nipple in her teeth if she wanted it. She could never really  _ forget _ his size, but moments that emphasized it made her shiver. He was extremely lean now - she couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to be held by him at a healthier weight, let alone the scale implied by the loose and altered clothing, the extra layers of padding and tight cords he used to make his ancient armor still fit.

“Zelda,” he rumbled, barely louder than the tumble of spring water. “Be at peace and trust that I too know the limits of my body and my spirit. Though your stubborn preference for the tower is irrational, it is a pleasure to attend these things for you. As you say, neither of us bear immediate or conflicting duties at midnight in a land still slumbering under Twilight’s cloak. Come, rest in the bath rajela. Leave the details to me.”

Zelda sighed and listened to his heartbeat for a moment. Even naked, he was a furnace all over, and the warmth of his skin in her hands and against her cheek was comforting.

His spiritlight blazed.

“Alright, I am persuaded,” she said finally as she patted his side. “Well, I  _ was _ persuaded some time ago, and then you had to display all your great,  _ big _ power. Your magic is rather nice, too.”

He laughed, warm and honest, squeezing her tight. “I don’t know that I shall ever get used to that saucy mouth. Do all women of your time speak so, are Hylian manners so changed? Or are you known for some especial stubbornness and spice?”

“Oh goodness, I should think  _ all _ speak this way, though it is generally considered rude to be caught doing so,” Zelda grinned and poked him. “But given the sacred maiden must never hear it, seems there may be a mysteriously stubborn spice in my bloodline somewhere.”

“Hn,” he said, unwinding his grasp only to bow and kiss the crown of her head.

“ _ Read _ , however, is a different story,” she began as he tugged the red shawl free of its lazy knots. “The library  _ does _ have some intriguing tomes that are probably banned due to some silly morality law or other. I enjoy those on occasion.” 

“Is that so,” he rumbled, folding the shawl.

“Some of them  _ might _ be handwritten in an obscure foreign script,” she taunted.

“A mystery for the ages, I’m sure,” he said, circling around her to toss the shawl on the vanity - and apparently surprise her from behind and sweep her up into his arms. He carried her the short distance to the bath and bowed to lay her directly in the rising waters. He again kissed the crown of her head and caressed her shoulder as she huffed in mild offense at his coddling. He ignored her, resting a knee on the ledge of the bath to untangle the circlet and counterweight from her messy hair. It always felt strange to be without it anymore, and surrendering the symbols of her station to the second man to steal her throne felt stranger still.

Zelda held her tongue though. Better not to give him any reason to remind her how limited her authority and independence, nor how reliant on his mercy. His softer qualities did nothing to diminish his arrogance or pride. He held no doubt whatever the mark of the Chosen of the Gods confirmed his claim to the Hylian throne as rightful, and arguing the point was hardly productive with Zant and the encroaching Twilight still very much an issue for most of the country.

Ganondorf laid her circlet atop the freshly folded red shawl at the center of the vanity. He rarely removed his own bold spoked hoop ornament with its minish chains and jeweled combs, even on those occasions he set aside the skullplate and formal coiffure, he  _ always _ anchored the exotic crown in the upswept mass of his thick red hair. Even through the better half of their trysts.

Except apparently now.

She folded her arms on the tiled ledge and rested her chin atop to watch him unclasp the chains from the hoop and divide the layers of the gilded setting of the topaz cabochon on his brow. He pulled each jeweled comb from its place, laying the pieces of the crown neatly on the vanity table. Untangling the spiked hoop looked tedious and fussy, but he remained silent, his expression closed. He laid it atop the delicate chains and summoned a penknife from somewhere, revealing the mystery of his dramatic coiffure as he cut and untangled bits of carmine woolen yarn anchoring each heavy twist and binding the ends. When he shook everything loose at last, the thick waves fell past his knee. He did not take time to comb it, but stole a gold sash from the vanity drawer and gathered it all in one fat low queue, his bountiful hair tied and looped thrice to keep it just below his shoulders.

It was silly, but an ache settled in her chest the longer she watched his quiet, methodical work. Something about the moment seemed desperately intimate, the resurrected king tending his own hair in such a plain fashion, for the first time letting her see all of him so clearly in the lamplight, naked but for his topaz brow ornament and corundum earrings.

When at last his own state apparently satisfied him, he still offered no conversation, but fussed over adding scented oils to the water, herbs to the fire, arranging soaps and cloths and combs and ribbons within reach. The bath was still barely half-full, and raised the question of how many barrels he was draining to feed it. The heat of the firerock pots rendered the luxury of the spring water undeniably compelling - yet Ganondorf perched on the wide ledge of the bath, beside the laden table, folding his long scarred legs in full lotus.

“I can’t exactly say I don’t bite,” Zelda teased as her fingers ran over his knee. “But the water would do you good as well, you know. Unless you find that you have filled my oasis quite enough already and are unable to do so again.”

He raised a brow. “Sa’deasa - are you always this voracious woman?”

“Only when the mood strikes me,” Zelda tilted her head as she looked up at him, leaving one hand on his knee and playing her other idly through the rising water. “Though in this case I wrap honesty in a cloak of vulgarity to get your attention and lure your silly ass into the water. If my cove feels this sore already, I am sure your thorn must as well. The basin is more than large enough to hold us both - and it will help save water.”

“Hn,” he said, shaking his head. “Hair first. Get over here, you stubborn harlot.”

“You know, if you want to play that sort of  _ sirbah _ , you’re going to have to wait until  _ after _ you’re done with my hair,” Zelda hummed as she drew her arms back into the water and turned. She settled on the oiled acacia bathing seat and tilted her head forward so he could gather her hair up. “Otherwise you might reawaken that appetite. I did rather enjoy your  _ suggestive _ little taunts from earlier. So just you watch it.”

“Never,” he rumbled, draping her ragged plait over his knee and picking up the widest tooth comb, which she could barely remember ever using before for any reason.

“And you call  _ me _ a harlot,” Zelda smirked. She sighed as the warm water rose above her navel. “I must ask - with hair as fine as mine, what use is that? The steel with the narrowest teeth is my usual-”

“Patience, rajela. All things have a proper order,” he chided gently, drawing her sidelocks back and picking loose the wrapped satin ribbon. “It is a lesson I too resisted in my youth. I spent more time in trouble than not in the years I was ilmaha, long and long ago. I was  _ always _ hungry, and meals were strictly regimented in every fortress and settlement of my people. The storeroom of the Kharish courts were the most heavily guarded, and to their rahallin kamali fell the duty of weaving the patterns of the meals for the good of the People. Understanding a thing in the mind, spirit,  _ and _ body are all different matters - even as I began to grasp the second, I could  _ not _ master the third. My amali always kept honeyglass and the like, and easy enough to steal a few little pieces from different bottles during their lessons, but fuel such as that burns more swiftly than ether of naphtha.”

“That’s not so different from Hylian courts, really. To guard the royal kitchens and larders was once as high an honor as attending the royal family directly,” Zelda hummed in thought. From the corner of her eye she watched him methodically unweave the side plaits with the wide comb, dividing one snarl from another as he worked, but not yet pulling them free. It seemed an odd and backwards way to approach the problem, but it didn’t hurt. “Though - fresh apples were always available in the main and public halls, at every hour, for any guest or subject who needed or desired one. Noblesse oblige, father said.”

Ganondorf chuckled darkly, smoothing her loose sidelocks over her shoulder and starting on the ugly, ragged tail of her braid. “A curiously specific sort of charity.”

“Father grew up in Appelan,” she said with a shrug, bracing for the inevitable pinprick pain of a lone strand pulled before its fellows. It hasn’t happened yet, but it would. “So of course the princess  _ couldn’t _ take of them. I had very much intended to change  _ that _ shortcoming when I took the throne. I  _ adore _ apples.”

“Noted,” he purred, pausing in his work to bow low enough to kiss the crown of her head for the third time in a quarter hour. The new habit struck her as particularly odd. It surely must hurt - the man who could easily fold himself in half while sitting lotus was rare. He just made it  _ look _ easy, surely. He did not linger thus, but returned to his chosen task with one little caress. “Had we ever had such bounty, no censure of any kind could have kept me from raiding it. I could not even  _ begin _ to concentrate on lectures and lessons - even those I liked - with my stomach gnawing on my spine all morning. Older, stronger ilmaha might steal from the bowls of younger and weaker in the fast-breaking at dawn, in the hour of Farore, at the hour of madness. If they were caught in the  _ taking _ , four to nine stripes might be given for each theft, depending on what was taken and how. No guard could watch  _ every _ ilmaha  _ all _ the time. Once consumed - who could say what was true?”

“That… sounds harsh,” Zelda frowned at his matter-of-fact tone describing such conditions. “How would any child survive, much less thrive?”

“Many didn’t,” he said quietly. He fell silent for several beats, concentrating on her hair. It felt like he’d reached her shoulder or so, where the queue twisted and floofed out above the three-strand plait. Her hair always became a snarl there, where it rubbed against necklines or collars or jewels, and surely the condition was even worse after a vigorous tumble. Still, he did not pull even one painful strand. “Fighting was encouraged. Our guardians judged the correct time to divide the ilmaha, and would critique the duel or melee after. Both were disciplined for disrupting the meal, and the elder paid more than the younger, regardless of who started the fight or who won it. Usually the wage of fighting was work - simple manual tasks, tedious and necessary, under the direction of the servants.”

“Given the few bits of text that survive, and of course the records of drought and such preceding the Pax Hylia, I can sort of see  _ why _ this method might evolve,” Zelda pursed her lips. “Constantly at war with a better equipped and usually better fed neighbor, you would want to make sure everyone knew how to fight, prizing victory over form or honor. But how would  _ anyone _ eat if everyone is stealing from anyone who can’t stop them?”

“Once old enough to eat with yearmates instead of with the amali, one learns to defend one’s portion and to eat quickly - and to steal in turn,” he said, leaning back and dividing her hair into fat sections to either side of the central tangle at the nape of her neck. “However - at the evening meal, all avadha and ilmaha ate together unless ill. Warriors were served first, then Varan - those in mourning - elders, master artisans, ilmaha, healers, servants, apprentice artisans and Kharish last of all. Anyone seen stealing from another’s eating bowl at dinner would be humiliated and punished harshly, regardless of rank. Food and water was precious. All the People understood that by the time they could speak a complete thought. Many avadha gifted their food to those of lower rank, and to ilmaha, but it was rarely enough.”

“No, I wouldn’t think it would be. Drought and famine are twins.”

“And plague their sister. Lean forward just - yes, hold still you fidgetwing,” he murmured, his tone distracted. He fussed over the tangle, and whatever he did caused heat to bloom behind her back. The level of the water began to reach her aching breasts at last - she longed to stretch out in the heat, but he would certainly chide her if she interrupted him now. “Your maids must use some manner of support for this style that you neglect. Or is this usually worn with a lower cut in the bodice, and something else for the arum-cut overgown?”

“If they do something else to the plait, I can’t remember. It’s been… a while. All of the formal regalia is designed for either arum-hem purple over muslin or purple surcoat over white kirtle. The latter is nearly impossible on my own,” she confessed with a little shrug. “It often tangles there anyway, no matter what style I wear. Sorry.”

“Hn,” he said, falling quiet to concentrate on his labor.

“You know, you could slip in here with me to do that. More comfortable, I should think,” she hazarded.

“Not yet,” he rumbled, stubborn as ever. “Anyway, I stole from my mothers and my sister most often, and from cowards who preyed on ilmaha many years younger than themselves. That habit  _ also _ was not enough. I was taller and heavier than my yearmates my whole life, and my appetite has inconveniently  _ always _ matched. My sister always left a portion of field rations in her desk drawer when she was on watch. The lock was beyond simple, barely qualified for the name. Which was a  _ very _ good thing, as I have never in my life mastered the most essential arts of the thief without magic.”

“Did - did you just admit to not only  _ not _ being the best at something, but quite possibly the worst?” Zelda sat in stunned silence for a moment. 

He laughed, drawing back from the work to caress her shoulder indulgently. “Hn. No, my  _ worst _ skill is sprinting. Or possibly climbing. I have not tested either since my return. My archery is likewise disgraceful - but who needs a bow when one has ballista and skyfire?”

“I - I see,” she stammered in dumbfounded shock at his unexpected candor and humility. “Why would your sister - surely born into the same advantage as yourself - use a non-lock with such rampant thievery?”

“Advantage is  _ not _ the word I would have chosen,” he said with a snort. “Enough of tedium - hold still.”

Zelda obeyed, unsurprised by the flare of golden light at the edges of her vision. She waited until he grunted satisfaction to speak. “Damned convenient enchantment, untangling snarls with a wave of your hand.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention, especially on campaign,” he returned, drawing the wide comb over her scalp gently. It made her shiver, and  _ that _ made  _ him _ laugh.


	16. Threads of History

When she could assemble a coherent thought again, she prodded him to continue, though she couldn’t see how any of his tale explained his sweet tooth. “Your sister - what was her name? It sounds like she was older?”

“Nabooru avadha Saiv. Seven years my senior. She was a formidable warrior and accomplished thief before I was born. Her amali was beloved of she who birthed me,” he said, gathering all her hair to the back as the spring water slowed to a trickle and stopped, level with her collarbone. “It was her way of giving without being seen to give. If it was not seen, it was not woven. Such details were deathly important in that time. Tip your head back and close your eyes.”

“Huh. Even with so harsh a culture, there remained a way to express compassion and caring, even if hidden or disavowed before others,” she mused, shifting to the edge of the bathing bench to do as he asked. She set aside the thought with a mental note to reconsider his habits in this new context next she was alone.

He did not answer. He cupped water in his hand and poured it over her hair in his fist. Handful by handful, soaking it from tip to root and gradually releasing the sodden weight to the water, until he could cup water in both hands to pour over her head. He scrambled her thoughts entirely with his fingers massaging herbed oils into her scalp. It seemed backwards to add  _ more _ oil to dirty hair, but it felt too wonderful letting him spoil her with such luxurious touch. 

A fierce ancient warlord attended her like the most faithful and intimate of body servants - and he was  _ good _ at it. She would never have imagined it. Even with his own extravagant red hair, surely he had servants to take care of it for him, or lacking that, he would surely use magic as he had to defeat the worst of  _ her _ tangles.

Except - he’d already let her see him undress and untangle his crown in prosaic and meditative simplicity. She longed to know why he kept the oddly discordant habits he did. He was rarely so open about his past - she hesitated to push, and ruin the mood.

He wiped her brow dry with soft linen and nudged her to sit upright again. He reached for a middling-sized comb and gathered her hair gently into his lap again.

“Thank you for sharing, my king, even if not much of the story ended up about sweets. I’ve long studied the fragments of the Gerudo language and history which survive, but after tonight and the curiosities of our cuisine and such, I think there must be more I’ve never thought to connect between the lines of the early Pax Hylia,” she said quietly.

“I shall be interested to hear whatever you find,” he rumbled, working the comb deftly through the length of her oiled tresses, section by section. “There is more, but if you are weary-”

“Not at all. I like to listen to you talk... when you’re not shouting.”

“Hn,” he said, enigmatic as ever while he worked his way up to the nape of her neck and began to establish a center part. “Anyway, thieving was a different matter for us than it is in Hyrule, then or now. The Legions defended our lands, but we also raided our more prosperous neighbors on regular circuits, especially in spring and fall. In many places, we took from the same rich or vulnerable estates year after year, and Hyrule  _ never _ learned. Three particular circuits were critical: southeast through Deya, north into the foothills of Vosterkun, and northwest into Salari.”

“Complacency, no doubt. Your remarks on it are quite scathing in the  _ Discourses _ ,” Zelda hummed in pleasure. “Or a secret sympathizer figured out and ensured the pattern remained predictable. What’s a little food from prosperous farmland?”

“An interesting thought. Perhaps the Nohallens were not alone in opposing the imperial efforts,” he conceded. “ _ If _ Hyrule did not pursue them as traitors. The entire Nohallen clan was slain, along with dozens of our warriors and hundreds of known or suspected mixed-blood children along the Thundering River partly on suspicion of such treason. Avarice, xenophobia, and sadism did the rest.”

Zelda drew a sharp breath, biting her tongue. Anyone conversant with Hylian dynastic history knew at least a sketch of that tragic fire and the subsequent persecutions in Windblade’s childhood - many scholars cited it as a significant factor in the strong ruler she became. That he knew it well - and personally - only deepened the challenge of forging a lasting peace with him. 

Within the royal family and higher shrinekeepers of every order in Hyrule they held the secret of the Sheikah-aided fratricide and stolen crown that nearly destroyed the country during her time. The success of the Pax Hylia in no small part rested upon the hard work of the strongest mages of three generations working with Queen Zelda Windblade to unravel the sins of the ancient curse compelling the Sheikah people to bondage - and hiding the betrayer’s attempt to leverage the threat of foreign invaders im order to send an innocent to the Arbiter’s Stone in a vengeful bid to call the judgement of the gods and spirits upon the royal house to which her people were bound.

Sages were forbidden to serve as Arbiters thereafter, orthodoxy laws dismantled and stripped from the books, primogeniture weakened, nearly every foreign exclusion act revoked, and tariffs halved. But for the wisdom of Windblade far more would have died - and no country would have ever again trusted a Hylian treaty.

She had long thought the unnamed innocents must refer to the purges of Ambrose Dedrick’s time, the echoes of them throughout the era of civil war, and the murder of Harkinian Johannes Nohansen Hyrule, Windblade’s father and true consort of Sophia Nichelle Hyrule, daughter of Zelda Nichelle Hyrule, heir to the blood of Hylia. The blin histories made clear Ganondorf’s exile came about in the same fashion at the Arbiter’s Grounds - but both their songs and the altered Hylian records were incredibly murky - and contradictory - on dates.

Ganondorf  _ wasn’t _ innocent. Couldn’t be. He admitted readily he was a warlord, a thief, a dark sorcerer allied with demons of every kind, his reign a ruthless one, his hands bloody.

He  _ also _ carried the Mark of the Chosen. 

When  _ exactly _ had it come to him? Did Windblade foresee disaster because he was destined to become the instrument of divine vengeance? Did the demon-blooded blins’  _ Song of Goldtusk  _ come even closer to the truth of history than she thought?

“An important spring raid in Salari not much before my fourth birthday became an absolute disaster. My sister won many honors for her valor defending the survivors in the retreat - and liberating critical provisions from a Hylian patrol on the way. Nonetheless, the rout brought us several hard winters,” he said, calm and matter-of-fact as he tipped her head back and extended the central part. He didn’t seem to notice her quietude. He exchanged the middling comb for the finest one, and smoothed a little more oil into her hair as he worked from the crown to the tip this time. “Later that year I unlocked the secrets of walking the shadows on the spirit roads. I could not go far or fast, but anywhere in shadow at twilight and dawn, when power shifts from one world to the other, darkness to light and light to dark, most of the physical world became as mist to me. I learned swiftly which things and places remained solid, and began my study of _ why _ , but most especially the magic which made the Kharish storeroom walls one of those things.”

“Intriguing. My ability to get around came much later,” Zelda chewed her lip. “I think. No one spoke much of what I was like when I was very young and I don’t recall much before my sixth birthday really. If I  _ did _ move through light by instinct when I was little, maybe it made the pitfalls of childhood easier.”

“Or  _ maybe _ you were a hellion,” he teased. “Leaping from trees and walls, thieving sweets and levitating expensive pottery...”

“Now  _ that _ is entirely possible and would never be allowed to be recorded,” Zelda grinned. “Cannot be known as anything but a delicate maiden, after all. What would people think of some demon child bearing the name  _ Zelda _ ?”

“Perhaps it would teach them  _ to _ think, instead of fawning over the idol of  _ tradition _ . As if being firstborn vai has anything to do with how strong your spiritual connection to your foremothers. How many distant cousins might carry as much a share of ancient blood as you, and bear daughters into the world with the potential to fulfill the duties of a Zelda? It is  _ irrational _ ,” he grumbled.

“Perhaps. It’s a tradition so ingrained that it would prove a significant challenge to change, now,” Zelda sighed. “We don’t really have a system to collect information about people who may qualify as a Zelda, and that would be the first step towards correcting it. Anyways, that is a rabbit-trail. You were confessing your terrible craving for sweets.”

“Patience rajela’v, it is all connected,” he rumbled. “In my fifth year I learned the way of Willing locks open, and thus which storerooms had stronger defenses and which weaker. To my rising delight, things preserved for festivals were  _ not _ under the best of the locks. Honeyglass, olives in brine, preserved quince and citron, rosewater and rich wines, roasted and sugared nuts, dried and sugared fruits, hard cheese, dense cakes sealed in layers of hardened sugarpaste and locked in wax-sealed tin boxes. Paradise.”

“Ah, such rare high praise  _ does _ confirm sweets are your weakness,” Zelda nodded sagely. “I shall have to ensure you have not already decimated the storehouse - and intrigue to restock it either way. I am certainly not above bribing you out of a foul mood with cookies. I am curious which were the strongest warded though?”

“Red wheat, and wild game. I did not care at the time: when I was ilmaha, I believed that as long as I risked getting caught in the storerooms, I might as well eat my favorite things while I was there, and festival foods were, in fact, my favorite.”

“Especially the sugary and fried things, I imagine.”

“But of course,” he rumbled with a lilt of amusement. He sectioned off two tiny locks over her brow, and two more slender sidelocks than she usually wore. The sidelocks he rolled onto plain twill ribbon, and tied them in an awkwardly ticklish knot before her ears. He chided her for fidgets and secured the remaining two right sections with their own plain ribbons, and bid her make a quarter turn to the left. He combed the loose sections one more time as he continued. 

“Ill fortune continued to plague our raids, and then the red cough came in my sixth winter. I no longer stole only for myself, but for yearmates and sectionmates confined in the plague courts. Everyone knows honey soothes the throat and strengthens the wind, and locked away from the rest of the people they had no opportunity to steal for themselves. I stole what was left after the evening meal also. I was caught often at  _ that _ , sentenced to eat only after everyone else. It gave me time to watch where the Kharish took their treasures, and to see who snuck food from her eating bowl into her pockets. Most did not expect to be stolen from in turn.”

“It sounds like such a punishment was meant to teach you exactly what you learned, given the tidbits thus far,” she said cautiously as he picked up the slender forward section and began a simple three-strand lace plait. It seemed strange to dress her hair without rinsing and scouring the oil first, but his deft fingers made quick work of the braid, adding a few strands every third crossing and never needing to stop to fight a tangle as her maids so often did.

“Perhaps it is so. I paid little attention to the habits that best served my yearmates. I studied with older ilmaha in any case, and had few connections among them. Fewer every year, actually,” he said, nudging her to look right as he reached the back of her head and stopped adding to his weave. “One guard carelessly left her keys behind when she went to the baths. I fashioned copies at once - and in _ ten minutes _ I gained access to half the storerooms off the southeast court where many of the Akash - our healers - slept, and which I had wasted  _ hours and hours _ trying to defeat. Raiding the medicine halls did not change the course of the plague in the end, nor did the fairy waters from the lost kokiri, nor the benevolent sentiments of the enemy’s blessed princess. Nonetheless, it taught me how very stupid my strategy to that moment. It was a lesson I shall never forget, and I forever owe an immense debt to that one careless Varan.”

“This took a dark turn for a story about how sweets have led you to trouble.”

“Ah, yes, perhaps my thoughts wander with such fine silk in my hands,” he teased, binding off the first plait. He stretched his fingers and petted her hair indulgently. He turned her head gently and sectioned off another slender lock over her brow and began another lace braid like the first. “I was caught often enough both before and after the lesson of keys to know every kind of rod and cable intimately by the time I went into the Sands to seize my Name. My amali did not tolerate disgrace or disappointment. I was ilmaha Rova, and I must be  _ better _ at  _ everything _ than every lesser creature than them. The rebuke from others when I was stupid enough to get caught was nothing to the fury of Kotake or Koume, and nevermind both. Not that this stopped me. It has always been as you say: sugar of every sort is my weakness. Even with the strongest and most rational of reasons to amend, I could not resist the lure of sweets as ilmaha, and I remain a glutton for them even now.”

“Hn,” she said, buying a moment to squirrel away yet another weighty crumb of his nature. He spoke of severe corporal punishment meted out to a  _ child _ with such casual disregard. Her heart ached to hear it. That his own mothers further magnified his suffering - and even ages later he considered it a natural consequence of an imperfection in himself - suggested he may have already been set in his distrustful, exacting, and withdrawn manner when he met Windblade - and everything she knew of her ancestor said the Princess of the  _ Discourses _ might  _ not _ have expressed an exaggerated conflation of evasion and silence with guilt for sake of literary convention after all. “To be ilmaha Rova sounds a  _ little _ like being a Princess Zelda. Can never be less than better than perfect. It was that damned apple tray, for me.”

“They complained of the same,” he said quietly. “It was one of our earliest common grounds, though they insulted my amali for having no excuse to expect princessly perfection from  _ Dinauru _ , a mere commonborn Gerudo.”

“ _ Light of Din _ , hm? How incredibly humble of you,” she teased, grateful for an opportunity to lighten the discussion.

He laughed, binding off the second plait - and starting a third. “Do you know they never guessed it? Twelve years, letter after letter, carried halfway across the world in secret, first by the swift and faithful friendship of the lost kokiri, and later by trained roc and the royal post they established, and  _ still _ they did not know me until I  _ told  _ them.”

“She - they? - must not have put any effort into the language. Or had no ability to,” Zelda tilted her head in thought before catching herself and moving back to the position he’d set. “It’s not so difficult to grasp a basic translation once you have the script and a decent collection of root words from the resources _ I  _ have available. The  _ challenge _ lies in the nuance and poetry necessary for true understanding.”

His hands paused. He said nothing. 

Zelda hurried to fill the taut silence, anxious that she’d offended him  _ again _ , in a moment she could not even see his face. “Given that a Zelda’s marriage is a huge political spectacle, it would be the height of rudeness to not greet envoys in their native ways if the Hylian tongue  _ can _ form the sounds. Could be their teachers did not expect Geld’o envoys. Which is really all a moot point from the perspective of now.”

“We warred with Hyrule for over four centuries. Our last attempt at diplomacy before  _ my _ reign was a massacre. Generations before me, sixty spirits of every pattern crossed the great bridge into green Hyrule against the will of the council of elder mothers, seeking to restore the ancient alliance with fair Hyrule - or at least a season of peaceful trade. Six returned, wounded in body and spirit, carrying the dreadful burden of reciting Hyrule’s sins. So, no. Neither they nor their guardians ever expected an envoy from the People,” he said carefully. 

Zelda sucked in a sharp breath.

He shifted the unfinished plait to his left hand and laid his right on her shoulder. The mark of the Chosen pulsed with gentle golden light.

“No.  _ I’m _ sorry. The accounts of what-is-to-me ancient history are far less sharp than what you grew up and lived in,” Zelda said, swallowing. “It does no good now, but I apologize for the sins of my people. I know it could never be enough to make anything right.”

“Regret cannot unravel a pattern alone, but if they who hold the threads move together, a new pattern may yet become. The only path is forward,” he said softly. 

“Progress can only be as bright as the lamp it turns upon history. I know Hyrule has often claimed it cannot do  _ this _ thing that is right because  _ that _ crisis is more pressing. The patterns of oppression and hate have often been cloaked thus,” Zelda said, turning just enough to cast a sidelong glance up at him. “Regret  _ can _ help inform how that pattern is woven.”

He tipped his chin, his expression opaque, his golden eyes fixed on her face as his right hand trailed over her skin so lightly. “I cannot join you in that particular sentiment.”

Zelda lifted her chin with resolve. “Alliance is not a question of sentiment, but reason. I desire to lay down the threads of the pattern that will at last right Hyrule’s many wrongs. You desire to reshape the world. Our designs are not so different.”

He tucked gentle fingertips under her chin, guiding her to turn further, adjusting the plait in his left hand to allow it. He studied her face as if he would read some weighty text. “Are they not? Or would you have me regret knowing you?”

“Now it is you who twist my words, my king,” Zelda said softly. “I would rather fall to twilight than have you regret this thread.”

Ganondorf bowed low, dropping the unfinished plait to pull her up into his arms and kiss her so tenderly she could scarcely breathe.


	17. Dawn

Eventually, Ganondorf finished plaiting her hair and joined her in the water. 

She tried to lure him into relaxing in the heat with her, but he would have none of it until he completed the pattern in his own head. As with his meditative fashion of undressing her, he washed her skin with a quiet and orderly progression, drawn out with such caresses as kept her on the edge of dizziness and lassitude for hours in his arms. Only when she yawned did he subside - and she seized the slender advantage to pin him into a corner of the bath and take _his_ hair down.

He laughed at her, and demanded more kisses, wrapping her legs around his waist. The fire burned low while she persuaded him to let her attend him in turn. He taught her the way of taming his rich red curls, and his deep voice purred. He became pliant in her hands, and his spirit shone with a strong and steady light as she washed clean every inch of his strong, scarred body.

He gave her more stories of childhood explorations and pranks and favorite landmarks of his vanished homeland, and she shared memories of hers before the drought settled in, helping him see where Hyrule _had_ changed for the better since his time, how the stagnation and complacency he saw in the spirits of Castletown was not the whole of her beloved country, how the difficult years leading to the invasion had fed the worst impulses of some, had revived long-dormant feuds and resentments, exacerbated provincial conflicts of interest, and the immediacy of the famine and plague and wildfires forced those troubles to the side.

He listened.

He did not _agree_ , but he listened.

And he stayed.

Rather than return to the wreckage of her bed when he too began to yawn, he heaped furs and blankets into the deep stone window seat stretching between the bath and hearth. He wound black silk scarves over her finished braids and his own, laying down beside her otherwise naked. He held her in the dying firelight, and he purred ancient poetry in her ear until sleep ambushed them both.

Zelda woke next curled on her side, cold ash in the hearth and her stomach rebuking her for her sloth and hedonism - and the right hand of her king resting over her heart, the mark of the Chosen of the Gods glowing gently gold.

He stirred and curled tighter against her when she lifted his hand to her lips.

“Sav’otta jacheli rajena,” she said.

“Hnnn savai rajela’v,” he mumbled, brushing his soft lips against her skin. “I want to make love to you like this.”

Zelda shivered. “But your stomach is growling back at mine, o va’rajena.”

“Let them growl. I am busy,” he rumbled, winding his arms tight around her.

“As much as I would adore starting the day with your blessings warming me, rajena, we both know you will not eat later if you do not eat now.”

“Hn.”

“And if it please my king, I understand there may be a sweet wine and honeyed fruit at lunch. One does not need to sample all things in one night.”

He grunted, rolling his hips against her.

“ _And_ I must still plan how to lure you into my bed again tonight,” she groaned, torn between savoring the tease of his heat against the back of her thighs and the fury of her empty stomach. “What leverage would I hold if I let you take your fill now?”

“I shall _never_ be sated with your light, rajela’v, for every sip increases my appetite,” he purred, nuzzling her hair.

Zelda sighed. “Flatterer.”

“Pot, kettle,” he teased, and from nowhere both objects appeared in the hearth, nestled on heaps of firerock shards. Within three beats, the rich fragrance of spiced black tea and spicebark-laden sweet porridge wafted through the air, suggesting he stole from his kitchen blins again.

“Your wit dazzles as always,” she taunted with a roll of her eyes.

“Hn,” he said, nuzzling her ear.

“I will warn my king that I _will_ strip him of his ability to walk before I’m done if he insists on stokeing my furnace. To return last night’s favor, of course,” Zelda promised with a coy smile, in no small part hoping he _would_ fulfill temptation and risk his pride. “Can the king of light and shadow withstand being seen weakened and hobbling about?”

“Why should a witch bother walking when he may fly instead?”

“Vanity.”

“Hn?”

“Your dashing figure appears to greatest advantage in walking.”

“Abominable harlot,” he grumbled, kissing her ear again. “Very well. Tea it is.”

Breakfast was as quiet and simple as their midnight feast, though he summoned a fresh loincloth, shirt, and sirwal for himself. All black, with subtle charcoal stitching about the hems, all overlarge. He draped her in her longest white chemise, and after the tea kettle was empty and their stomachs full, he offered to help her dress. 

His touch lingered over the curse naevi as she stood before him to be laced into the long stays. The complex black fractal glyphs seemed thinner and fainter somehow, but she assumed it a trick of her eyes and wishful thinking until he asked if she was using her glamouries to mute them.

She wasn’t.

He made her climb up onto the vanity bench and hold the hem of her chemise high so he could study her skin more closely. The intensity of his focus did not waver even when his hand on her inner thigh made her most selfish flesh tremble and burn.

“You did not feel the borders move either?”

“No,” she confessed, though his fingertips tracing the enchanted glyphs made _other_ things move under her skin.

“Nonetheless, the balance has shifted. I must away - and I cannot promise the hour of my return,” he said with a shake of his head, gesturing for her to drop the fine linen and come down from the bench. “If you would prefer a different gown-”

“I haven’t worn the kirtle and surcoat in nearly a year. It might be a nice change - if you can spare the time to lace it all.”

“Hn. Anything you need in my absence, ask Halfhorn - they are the most fluent in your tongue, and I will leave orders with the rest of the castle guard captains to regard them as your Voice,” he said, picking up the white kirtle again.

Zelda sighed and _tried_ to make her heart as iron for his leaving already. It refused.

“I thank you, my king,” Zelda said, hoping her disappointment didn’t seep into her voice. “They’re quite proficient and kind. Perhaps we shall explore that sweet wine and honeyed fruit some other day. Before you go, there _is_ a thing I will need that none of your blins can adequately supply. Only you.”

He secured the spiral lacing of the fitted bodice before peering over her shoulder to meet her eye, brow raised in query.

“Your lips, my king.”

“Hn,” he said, tracing a fingertip down the line of her jaw. He kissed her brow. “Patience, vo’rajela. There is an order even in these things.”

She grumbled.

He laughed and kissed her brow again, hearing no further argument as he draped her in royal purples, fresh stockings and gloves, the ritual girdle and golden pectoral. Last of all, when everything down to the onion-gold ribbons of her soft slippers were arranged to his satisfaction, he bade her sit before the vanity to let him unwind the black scarf and crisp twill ribbons from her hair. To her surprise, six slender braids coiling around the crown of her head did not look strange as she expected, but elegant and tidy, not unlike the caryatid figures in the ancient ruins of many west highlands temples. Neither they nor the central fishbone plait had frayed in her sleep, and the way he wove it, the weight stayed off the back of her neck unless she tucked her chin all the way to her chest. Unraveling the stiff twill ribbons revealed further cleverness in his method: her sidelocks and the tail of the fishbone plait hung in ringlets even more perfect than her senior handmaiden could make with two hours wielding the roundiron.

She toyed with the tight spiral lock as he tidied the little ribbons into a bundle and dropped them back in their drawer. Unlike the fragile results of the roundiron, these ringlets bounced back into form with very little alteration, even without a mist of starch-water and egg white which were necessary for maintaining elaborate coiffures for rituals and balls. And - despite the oils he used, she didn’t feel the heaviness she expected to, now that everything was dry.

“If you decide this pattern is sufficient, you will not need to trouble with tending it for two or three days, though the shape will begin to soften if not tied when you sleep,” he said, picking up her circlet and its platinum counterweight - to which the little disguised blade was mysteriously returned. 

“Will you be gone so long?” Zelda hazarded, surprised by the strange flutter in her core as she watched him arrange the laurel-and-maiden-lily circlet over her plaits. Crowning her before himself, with a manner uncannily like reverence.

“I cannot yet say. The guard unit at the south town gate will be able to relay anything necessary if I will be afield longer,” he said, pinning the counterweight chain to the lowest coil of the small braids and nestling the point of the winged ornament into the highest crossings of the fishbone plait.

Zelda was silent a moment as she looked at herself in the mirror, and mused that they would make a fine portrait if ever they could find a painter who was not cursed into spirit form. 

_Especially_ if he left his shirt laces loose.

“I hope your thread will be soon woven back towards mine,” she said, looking at his eye in the reflection. She smiled impishly. “I still need to take away your ability to walk, after all.”

“Hn,” he said, coiling his long braid into a tight knot at the back of his head and securing it with dozens of gilded pins. “I shall look forward to the amusement of your valiant and futile attempt, dear Princess.”

“You called my attempt to engulf you futile as well,” Zelda tilted her head at him and licked her lips. Her core fluttered as it recalled his shape. “So you’ll pardon me if I am disinclined to accept your boastful claims.”

His eyes crinkled in that charming way he had, softening the habitual sardonic smirk. He anchored the spiked golden hoop around his coiled braid and summoned each minish chain from the vanity in turn to secure it to the spoked outer setting of the topaz cabochon he was _never_ without. “Curious that the wise Princess should forget so swiftly the wages of her midnight hubris was _her_ inability to stand.”

“A cost that was all too cheap to pay. Who needs legs when there are such delights?” Zelda’s core throbbed wantonly. Zelda’s eyes fluttered as her body reminded her of how he felt. She could almost feel where his ridge would rest if - she took a deep breath and admired his reflection again. “Who could prize an elegant stance over that _stretch_ and fullness…”

“Hn. Temptress,” he said with a disparaging click of his tongue as he offered his hand for her to rise. “ _One_ kiss, and then I _must_ go. Do not do anything foolish in my absence or I _shall_ be cross.”

Zelda accepted and rose. Her heart did not stop with her body, and she schooled her tongue before it tried to run away from her.

“I shall treasure it, my king. And if _you_ do anything foolish,” Zelda squinted up at him in sober study, letting the pregnant pause hang in the air. “Well. I _shall_ find a way to chastise you.”

“Such promises,” he purred, bowing to offer his soft lips, still sweet with honey and spicebark and clove.

**Fin**


End file.
